"More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3"

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 05 Jan 2014 08:22:38 -0500
Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
> On 1/5/14 8:14 AM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> > http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode-in-2-and-3/
> >
> > Please don't shoot the messenger :)
> >
> 
> With all of the talk about py 2 vs. py3 these days, this is the blog 
> post that I think deserves the most real attention.  I haven't had to do 
> the kind of coding that Armin is talking about, but I've heard more than 
> one person talk about the difficulty of it in Python 3.
> 
> If anyone wants Python 3 uptake improved, the best thing would be to 
> either explain to Armin how he missed the easy way to do what he wants 
> (seems unlikely), or advocate to the core devs why they should change 
> things to improve this situation.

Sometimes the best way to "advocate to the core devs" is to do part of
the work, though.

There are several people arguing for %-formatting or .format() on
bytes, but that still lacks a clear description of which formatting
codes would be supported, with which semantics.
(see e.g. http://bugs.python.org/issue3982)

As for the rest of Armin's rant, well, it's a rant. "In some cases
Python 3 is a bit less practical than Python 2" doesn't equate to
"Python 3 is broken and 2.8 should be released instead".

Regards

Antoine.