On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 11:43:02AM -0400, Phillip J. Eby wrote: > At 09:21 AM 8/23/2005 -0600, Neil Schemenauer wrote: > >> then of course, one could change ``unicode.__str__()`` to return > >> ``self``, itself, which should work. but then, why so complicated? > > > >I think that may be the right fix. > > No, it isn't. Right now str(u"x") coerces the unicode object to a > string, so changing this will be backwards-incompatible with any > existing programs.
I meant that for the implementation of the PEP, changing unicode.__str__ to return self seems to be the right fix. Whether you believe that str() should be allowed to return unicode instances is a different question. > I think the new builtin is actually the right way to go for both 2.x and > 3.x Pythons. i.e., text() would be a builtin in 2.x, along with a new > bytes() type, and in 3.x text() could replace the basestring, str and > unicode types. Perhaps the critical question is what will the string type in P3k be called? If it will be 'str' then I think the PEP makes sense. If it will be something else, then there should be a corresponding type slot (e.g. __text__). What method does your proposed text() built-in call? > I also think that the text() constructor should have a signature of > 'text(ob,encoding="ascii")'. I think that's a bad idea. We want to get away from ASCII and use Unicode instead. > In the default case, strings can be returned by text() as long as > they are pure ASCII (making the code str-stable *and* > unicode-safe). I think you misunderstand the PEP. Your proposed function is neither Unicode-safe nor str-stable, the worst of both worlds. Passing it a unicode string that contains non-ASCII characters would result in an exception (not Unicode-safe). Passing it a str results in a unicode return value (not str-stable). Neil _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
