[Python-Dev] PEP 414 (original) (raw)

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Mar 3 10:26:12 CET 2012

Lennart Regebro <regebro gmail.com> writes:

So the question is if you have any proposal that is less confusing while still being practical. Because we do need to distinguish between binary, Unicode and "native" strings. Isn't this the least confusing solution?

It's a matter of the degree of confusion caused (hard to assess) and also a question of taste, so there will be differing views on this. Considering use of unicode_literals, 'xxx' for text, b'yyy' for bytes and with a function wrapper to mark native strings, it becomes clear that the native strings are special cases - much less encountered when looking at code compared to 'xxx' / b'yyy', so there are fewer opportunities for confusion. Where native strings need to be discussed, then it is not unexceptional, nor I believe incorrect, to explain that they are there to suit the requirements of legacy APIs which pre-date Python 3 and the latest versions of Python 2. In terms of practicality, it is IMO quite practical (assuming 2.5 / earlier support can be dropped) to move to a 2.6+/3.x-friendly codebase, e.g. by using Armin's python-modernize.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

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