Python usage numbers

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com> wrote:
> However, in at
> least one current thread (on python-ideas) and at a variety of times
> in the past, _some_ people have found Unicode in Python 3 to make more
> work.

If Unicode in Python is causing you more work, isn't it most likely
that the issue would have come up anyway? For instance, suppose you
have a web form and you accept customer names, which you then store in
a database. You could assume that the browser submits it in UTF-8 and
that your database back-end can accept UTF-8, and then pretend that
it's all ASCII, but if you then want to upper-case the name for a
heading, somewhere you're going to needto deal with Unicode; and when
your programming language has facilities like str.upper(), that's
going to make it easier, not later. Sure, the simple case is easier if
you pretend it's all ASCII, but it's still better to have language
facilities.

ChrisA