Python moratorium and the future of 2.x [LWN.net]

Python moratorium and the future of 2.x

Posted Nov 12, 2009 9:46 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
In reply to: Python moratorium and the future of 2.x by drag
Parent article: Python moratorium and the future of 2.x

If Python has "true unicode support" then I'm very happy to work with some untrue
unicode support which actually works and is not as painfull...

But let's not start another language flamewar.

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Python moratorium and the future of 2.x

Posted Nov 12, 2009 14:07 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I don't care about Perl vs Python or anything like that. To each their own,
but there are definitely good and practical reasons why 3 is not backwards
compatible.

Anyways it's always been something normal to have multiple versions of
Python installed. I have 3 versions installed right now and while pure
python generally packages work across all of them, most complex modules
have some C code in them and you end up with a lot of multiple copies of
the same module.

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As far as unicode support goes it is not a issue of 'true' vs 'untrue'
unicode support the difference is having 8-bit strings heavily overloaded
as the basic datatype for the entire implementation and every modules and
issues with data type conversions and mismatching string types a common
source of python bugs because unicode was tacked onto the language after
the fact versus having all strings be unicode and having a separate basic
byte datatype for storing data.