Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

[Mark Lawrence]

On 14/12/2013 14:15, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 1:03 AM,  <wxjmfauth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> D:\>chcp 65001
>> Page de codes active : 65001
>> D:\>echo "*"
>> "*"
>> D:\>
>>
>>
>>>>> locale.getdefaultlocale()
>> ('fr_CH', 'cp1252')
>>
>> ----------
>>
>> In my understanding and experience, in the MS world
>> (desktop, intel), today:
>> Unicode == utf-16-le
>
> You still haven't explained how Win7 is different from every other
> Windows going back as far as NT. Back in the NT days, Windows had
> "Unicode" (really UCS-2 - it predated Unicode 2.0, so that was correct
> for a few years) while OS/2 had DBCS. Hindsight shows that OS/2 did
> kinda get left behind there :) Though maybe it would be easier to
> force migration from DBCS to true Unicode than from UTF-16 or UCS-2
> where it looks fine till you hit an astral character. Now how is Win7
> different from NT? And where does the current "oldstable" Windows (if
> I may borrow a term from Debian), XP, fit into that?
>
>> If you think, utf-16, because of surrogate pairs, is
>> not a proper solution, the single choice is utf-32.
>>
>> You may not be aware, you are already using utf-32
>> probably much more than you think, (in a correct way).
>
> Yeah. I use UTF-32 a lot, often stored in ways that elide unnecessary
> 00 bytes. It's a pretty good system, actually, giving high
> performance, compact memory usage, and correct behaviour. Still don't
> know what this has to do with Win7.
>
> ChrisA
>

Reread "The Emperor's New Clothes" and you'll get it :)

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask 
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence