On Tue, 09 Jul 2013 07:49:45 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 6:56 AM, Dave Angel <da...@davea.name> wrote: >> But Unicode has nothing to do with Guido, and it has existed for about >> 25 years (if I recall correctly). > > Depends how you measure. According to [1], the work kinda began back > then (25 years ago being 1988), but it wasn't till 1991/92 that the spec > was published. Also, the full Unicode range with multiple planes came > about in 1996, with Unicode 2.0, so that could also be considered the > beginning of Unicode. But that still means it's nearly old enough to > drink, so programmers ought to be aware of it.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It's really not that hard to get the basics of Unicode. "When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough. So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html Also: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html To start with, if you're writing code for Python 2.x, and not using u'' for strings, then you're making a rod for your own back. Do yourself a favour and get into the habit of always using u'' strings in Python 2. I'll-start-taking-my-own-advice-next-week-I-promise-ly yrs, -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list