Steven D'Aprano <[email protected]>:
> On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 18:32:39 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> Unicode, like ASCII, is a code. Representing text in unicode is
>> encoding.
>
> A Unicode string as an abstract data type has no encoding.
Unicode itself is an encoding. See it in action here:
72 101 108 108 111 44 32 119 111 114 108 100
> It is a Platonic ideal, a pure form like the real numbers.
Far from it. It is a mapping from symbols to integers. The symbols are
the Platonic ones.
The Unicode/ASCII encoding above represents the same "Platonic" string
as this ESCDIC one:
212 133 147 147 150 107 64 166 150 153 137 132
> Unicode string like this:
>
> s = u"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
>
> should not be thought of as a bunch of bytes in some encoding,
Encoding is not tied to bytes or even computers. People can speak in
code, after all.
Marko
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