[Python-Dev] PEP 393 Summer of Code Project

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 4:58 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> The problem with your legalistic approach, as I see it, is that if our
> definition is looser than the users', all their surprises will be
> unpleasant.  That's not good.

I see no alternative to explicitly spelling out what all operations do
and let the user figure out whether that meets their needs. E.g. we
needn't say that the str type or its == operator conforms to the
Unicode standard. We just need to say that the string type is a
sequence of code points, that string operations don't do validation or
normalization, and that to do a comparison that takes the Unicode
std's definition of equivalence (or collation, etc.) into account you
must call a certain library method.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)