On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 18:32:39 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com>: > >> On 06/06/2014 08:10 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >>> Ethan Furman <et...@stoneleaf.us>: >>>> ASCII is *not* the state of "this string has no encoding" -- that >>>> would be Unicode; a Unicode string, as a data type, has no encoding. >>> >>> Huh? >> >> [...] >> >> What part of his statement are you saying "Huh?" about? > > Unicode, like ASCII, is a code. Representing text in unicode is > encoding.
A Unicode string as an abstract data type has no encoding. It is a Platonic ideal, a pure form like the real numbers. There are no bytes, no bits, just code points. That is what Ethan means. A Unicode string like this: s = u"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!" should not be thought of as a bunch of bytes in some encoding, but as an array of code points. Eventually the abstraction will leak, all abstractions do, but not for a very long time. -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
