"Martin v. Löwis" writes: > >> 5) represent all environment variables in Unicode strings, > >> including the ones that currently fail to decode. > >> (then do the same to file names, then drop the byte-oriented > >> file operations again) > > > > Please, don't do that! Bytes are not characters! > > And environment variables, command line arguments, and file names > are not bytes, but characters.
Unfortunately, both POSIX and OS implementation practice (including, for example, VFAT file systems: NT-derived OSes are not safe!) say otherwise, and that makes your line of argument extremely dangerous. Remember, in a fight between human custom and machine programming, the machine can always win by crashing. For that reason, bytes must be the underlying representation, always available, although I think it's essential to make a text representation easily accessible, and even the default. Humans who would rather kvetch about the machine's breakage than get a useful answer can (and should---problems will be rare for most usage patterns) use the text representation. Humans who want reliability or debuggability, on the other hand, should have something that cannot be mistaken for text immediately available. _______________________________________________ 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
