Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

Posted Jan 16, 2020 16:05 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3 by nim-nim
Parent article: Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

So you're saying that Python shouldn't be able to deal with users' files because *other* programs may (or may not) have a problem with that? What kind of logic is that?!

Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

Posted Jan 16, 2020 16:36 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> So you're saying that Python shouldn't be able to deal with users' files because *other* programs may (or may not) have a problem with that? What kind of logic is that?!

Not caring about funky filenames because most other programs don't care either: seems perfectly logic to me. You're confusing likeliness and logic.

Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

Posted Jan 16, 2020 17:15 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Speaking of likeliness and happiness, let me share my personal preference. I'll stay brief or let's say briefer; seems doable.

I'm very happy that Python catches funky filenames at a relatively low-level with a clear, generic, usual, googlable and stackoverflowable exception rather than with some obscure crash and/or security issue specific to each Python program. These references about "garbage-in, garbage-out" surrogates that I don't have time to read scare me, I wish there were a way to turn them off.

I do not claim Python made all the right unicode decisions, I don't know what. I bet not, nothing's perfect. This comment is only about funky file names.