[Python-Dev] Multilingual programming article on the Red Hat Developer blog

[Jeff Allen]

A welcome article. One correction should be made, I believe: the area of 
code point space used for the smuggling of bytes under PEP-383 is not a 
"Unicode Private Use Area", but a portion of the trailing surrogate 
range. This is a code violation, which I imagine is why 
"surrogateescape" is an error handler, not a codec.

http://www.unicode.org/faq/private_use.html

I believe the private use area was considered and rejected for PEP-383. 
In an implementation of the type unicode based on UTF-16 (Jython), lone 
surrogates preclude a naive use of the platform string library. This is 
on my mind at the moment as I'm working several bugs in Jython's unicode 
type, and can see why it has been too difficult.

Jeff

On 10/09/2014 08:17, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Since it may come in handy when discussing "Why was Python 3
> necessary?" with folks, I wanted to point out that my article on the
> transition to multilingual programming has now been reposted on the
> Red Hat developer blog:
> http://developerblog.redhat.com/2014/09/09/transition-to-multilingual-programming-python/
>
> I wouldn't normally bring the Red Hat brand into an upstream
> discussion like that, but this myth that Python 3 is killing the
> language, and that Python 2 could have continued as a viable
> development platform indefinitely "if only Guido and the core
> development team hadn't decided to go ahead and create Python 3", is
> just plain wrong, and it really needs to die.
>
> I'm hoping that borrowing a bit of Red Hat's enterprise credibility
> will finally get people to understand that we really do have some idea
> what we're doing, which is why most of our redistributors and many of
> our key users are helping to push the migration forward, while we also
> continue to support existing Python 2 users :)
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>