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0 pointsCoolGuySteve6y ago0 comments

I find the stronger differentiation between bytes and strings leads to a lot of gotchas, like when I forget to encode bytes or pass a string where bytes are expected.

I understand why it's the way it is, but when it comes the the typical unixy things I need to do shuffling of files around, tar'ing stuff, etc, it definitely trips me up more than I'd wish.

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mkesper6y ago

You at least notice it's wrong. In Python2 sometimes 'it worked' until it broke and you had to figure out why.

snagglegaggle6y ago

See, it just broke when UTF-8 was interpreted as ASCII. It's entirely possible to treat bytes as bytes and leave encoding out of it for the vast majority of programs. If you're dealing with text editing and so on, then you know you need to be UTF-8 aware, and the broken programs would still be broken in either language.

The visibility of the errors is a minor point, but I think it more appropriate that it be solved by e.g. the windowing toolkit API.

stefco_6y ago

> the broken programs would still be broken in either language.

You need to slap a decode anyway on reads from subprocesses in python3, and files open in Unicode mode by default. Wouldn't that fix the majority of silly UTF-8 compat bugs? Or am I missing a class of bugs that's not avoided automatically by python3 strings?

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