Learning Python now coming from Perl

[MRAB]

Bertilo Wennergren wrote:
> Aahz wrote:
> 
>> In article <ghe0jo$3i1$1 at news.motzarella.org>,
> 
>> Bertilo Wennergren  <bertilow at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> I don't suppose there is any introductory material out there that is
>>> based on Python 3000 and that is also geared at people with a Perl
>>> background? Too early for that I guess..
> 
>> Honestly, the differences between 2.x and 3.0 are small enough that it
>> doesn't much matter, as long as you're not the kind of person who gets
>> put off by little problems.  Because so much material is for 2.x, you
>> may be better off just learning 2.x first and then moving to 3.x.
> 
> The main reason I waited until Python 3000 came out is
> the new way Unicode is handled. The old way seemed really
> broken to me. Much of what I do when I program consists
> of juggling Unicode text (real Unicode text with lots of
> actual characters outside of Latin 1). So in my case
> learning version 2.x first might not be very convenient.
> I'd just get bogged down with the strange way 2.x handles
> such data. I'd rather skip that completely and just go
> with the Unicode handling in 3.0.
> 
I wouldn't have said it was broken, it's just that it was a later 
addition to the language and backwards compatibility is important. 
Tidying things which would break backwards compatibility in a big way 
was deliberately left to a major version, Python 3.