[Python-Dev] PEP 460 reboot (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Jan 13 22:24:00 CET 2014

Glenn Linderman wrote:

Quotes in the stream are a great debug hint, without blowing up.

But do you really want those quotes turning up in a binary stream, where they're somewhere between awkward and near-impossible to spot by eyeballing, and may only be discovered when something else -- likely a different program, possibly being run by a different person -- tries to read the data back, and blows up because the binary format is corrupted?

I'd much rather it blew up at the writing stage, myself. Corrupted binary data is much harder to debug than corrupted text, because binary formats typically have little to no margin for error before they become complete garbage.

-- Greg

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