On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 3:38 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Python 2's ambiguity allows me not to answer the tough philosophical >> questions. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing, but it has its >> benefits. > > It's not a good thing. It means that you have the convenience of > pretending there's no problem, which means you don't notice trouble > until something happens... and then, in all probability, your app is > in production and you have no idea why stuff went wrong.
BITD, when I still maintained and developed Musi-Cal (an early online concert calendar, long since gone), I faced a challenge when I first started encountering non-ASCII band names and cities. I resisted UTF-8. After all, if I printed a string containing an "é", it came out looking like What kind of mess was that??? I tried to ignore it, or assume Latin-1 would cover all the bases (my first non-ASCII inputs tended to come from Western Europe). If nothing else, at least "é" was legible. Needless to say, those approaches didn't work well. After perhaps six months or a year, I broke down and started converting everything coming in or going out to UTF-8 at the boundaries of my system (making educated guesses at input encodings if necessary). My life got a whole lot easier after that. The distinction between bytes and text didn't really matter much, certainly not compared to the mess I had before where strings of unknown data leaked into my system and its database. Skip P.S. My apologies for the mess this message probably is. Amazing as it may seem, Gmail in Chrome does a crappy job editing anything other than plain text. Also, I'm surprised in this day and age that common tools like Gnome Terminal have little or no encoding support. I wound up having to pop up urxvt to get an encodings-flexible terminal emulator...
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