On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Perhaps the *stupidest* thing the author of the "Python 3 is killing > Python" blog post wrote was that it's easier to port Python code to a > *completely different language*. I cannot fathom the idiocy of somebody > who bitches and moans that having to re-write or redesign, oh, let's > conservatively say 5% of your Python 2 code is harder than writing your > code *completely from scratch* in a completely different language, with > completely different third party libraries.
There's only one way that it's easier to port to a completely new language. Pick another language where string handling is as naive as my last boss (who told me to make sure that my code was "eight-bit clean, that is to say, Unicode safe", and used the words "Unicode" and "UTF-8" as synonymous), and then you can continue to stick your head in the sand and pretend that ASCII is what matters, that "special characters" work because of the magic of UTF-8, and that oh, yeah, I guess we'd better occasionally test our code with a few of those annoyingly different characters, but ehh, it doesn't really matter much. Having been guilty of something like that (actually, in one program I assumed all the incoming text was CP-1252, so it really *was* byte==char), I am extremely aware of the problems that it causes. But it does make initial coding a lot easier - at the expense of debugging later, when you discover that some things don't work. The Py3 approach forces you to fix things up-front, and that's hard! But then there are no bugs. I know which one I'd rather. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
