Python 3.2 has some deadly infection

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 17:17:05 +0100, Robin Becker wrote:

> Bytes are the underlying
> concept and should have remained so for simplicity's sake.

Bytes are the underlying concept for classes too. Do you think that an 
opaque unstructured blob of bytes is "simpler" to use than a class? How 
would an unstructured blob of bytes be simpler to use than an array of 
multi-byte characters?

Earlier:

> I dislike the current model, but that's because I had a lot of stuff to
> convert and probably made a bunch of blunders. The reportlab code is
> now a mess of hacks to keep it alive for 2.7 & >=3.3;

Although I've been critical of many of your statements, I am sympathetic 
to your pain. There's no doubt that that the transition from the old, 
broken system of bytes masquerading as text can be hard, especially to 
those who never quite get past the misleading and false paradigm that 
"bytes are ASCII". It may have been that there were better ways to have 
updated to 3.3; perhaps you were merely unfortunate to have updated too 
early, and had you waited to 3.4 or 3.5 things would have been better. I 
don't know.

But whatever the situation, and despite our differences of opinion about 
Unicode, THANK YOU for having updated ReportLabs to 3.3.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/