Gábor Farkas schrieb: > while i understand the constraints, i think it's not a good decision to > leave this to be implementation-dependent. > > the strings seem to me as such a basic functionality, that it's > behaviour should not depend on the platform. > > for example, how is an application developer then supposed to write > their applications?
An application developer should always know what the target platforms are. For example, does the code need to work with IronPython or not? Python is not aiming at 100% portability at all costs. Many aspects are platform dependent, and while this has complicated some applications, is has simplified others (which could make use of platform details that otherwise would not have been exposed to the Python programmer). > should he write his own slicing/whatever functions to get consistent > behaviour on linux/windows? Depends on the application, and the specific slicing operations. If the slicing appears in the processing of .ini files (say), no platform-dependent slicing should be necessary. > i think this is not just a 'theoretical' issue. it's a very practical > issue. the only reason why it does not seem to be important, because > currently not much of the non-16-bit unicode characters are used. No, there is a deeper reason. A typical program only performs substring operations on selected boundaries (such as whitespace, or punctuation). Those are typically in the BMP (not sure whether *any* punctuation is outside the BMP). > but the same way i could say, that because most of the unix-world is > utf-8, for those pythons the best way is to handle it internally as > utf-8, couldn't i? I think you live in a free country: you can certainly say that. I think you would be wrong. The common on-disk/on-wire representation of text should not influence the design of an in-memory representation. > it simply seems to me strange to make compromises that makes the life of > the cpython-users harder, just to make the life for the > jython/ironpython developers (i mean the 'creators') easier. Guido didn't say that the life of the CPython user needs to be hard. He said it will be implementation-dependent, referring to Jython and IronPython. Whether or not CPython uses a consistent representation or consistent python-level experience across platforms is a different issue. CPython could behave absolutely consistently, and use four-byte Unicode on all systems, and the length of a non-BMP string would still be implementation-defined. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
