[I18n-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] Unicode debate

[Paul Prescod]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> ....
> 
> Have you tried using this?

Yes. I haven't had large problems with it.

As long as you know what is going on, it doesn't usually hurt anything
because you can just explicitly set up the decoding you want. It's like
the int division problem. You get bitten a few times and then get
careful.

It's the naive user who will be surprised by these random UTF-8 decoding
errors. 

That's why this is NOT a convenience issue (are you listening MAL???).
It's a short and long term simplicity issue. There are lots of languages
where it is de rigeur to discover and work around inconvenient and
confusing default behaviors. I just don't think that we should be ADDING
such behaviors.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself
It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only
communication coin we can count on. 
	- http://www.cs.yale.edu/~perlis-alan/quotes.html