Lennart Regebro wrote: > On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 20:07, James Y Knight <f...@fuhm.net> wrote: >> Yeah. This is a real issue I have with the direction Python3 went: it pushes >> you into decoding everything to unicode early, even when you don't care -- > > Well, yes, maybe even if *you* don't care. But often the functions you > need to call must care, and then you need to decode to unicode, even > if you personally don't care. And in those cases, you should deocde as > early as possible. > > In the cases where neither you nor the functions you call care, then > you don't have to decode, and you can happily pass binary data from > one function to another. > > So this is not really a question of the direction Python 3 went. It's > more a case that some methods that *could* do their transformations in > a well defined way on bytes don't, and then force you to decode to > unicode. But that's not a problem with direction, it's just a missing > feature in the stdlib.
The discussion is showing that in at least a few application spaces, the stdlib should be able to work on both bytes and Unicode, preferably using the same interfaces using polymorphism, i.e. some_function(bytes) -> bytes some_function(str) -> str In Python2 this partially works due to the automatic bytes->str conversion (in some cases you get some_function(bytes) -> str), the codec base class implementations being a prime example. In Python3, things have to be done explicity and I think we need to add a few helpers to make writing such str/bytes interfaces easier. We've already had some suggestions in that area, but probably need to collect a few more ideas based on real-life porting attempts. I'd like to make this a topic at the upcoming language summit in Birmingham, if Michael agrees. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Jun 24 2010) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ 2010-07-19: EuroPython 2010, Birmingham, UK 24 days to go ::: Try our new mxODBC.Connect Python Database Interface for free ! :::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ _______________________________________________ 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
