[Python-Dev] PEP 460: allowing %d and %f and mojibake (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Jan 14 09:20:27 CET 2014

Guido van Rossum wrote:

I've now looked at asciistr. (Thanks Glenn and Ethan for the link.)

Now that I (hopefully) understand it, I'm worried that a text processing algorithm that uses asciistr might under hard-to-predict circumstances (such as when the arguments contain nothing of interest to the algorithm) might return an asciistr instance instead of a str or bytes instance,

It seems to me that any algorithm with that property has a genuine ambiguity as to what it should return in that case. Arguably, returning an asciistr would be the right thing to do, because that would allow it to be used as a component of a larger algorithm that was polymorphic with respect to text/bytes.

-- Greg

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