Python 3.2 has some deadly infection

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu>:

> Different OSes *do* have different assumptions. Both MacOSX and
> current Windows use (UCS-2 or) UTF-16 for text.

Linux can use anything for text; UTF-8 has become a de-facto standard.

How text is represented is very different from whether text is a
fundamental data type. A fundamental text file is such that ordinary
operating system facilities can't see inside the black box (that is,
they are *not* encoded as far as the applications go).

I have no idea how opaque text files are in Windows or OS-X.

> For Windows, at least, the interface is much improved in Python 3.

Yes, I get the feeling that Python is reaching out to Windows and OS-X
and trying to make linux look like them.

> I understand that some, but not all, Latin alphabet *nix programmers
> wish that Python 3 continued to be strongly in their favor. But they
> are a small minority of the world's programmers, and Python 3 is aimed
> at everyone on all systems.

Python allows linux programmers to write native linux programs. Maybe it
allows Windows programmers to write native Windows programs. I certainly
hope so.

I don't want to have to write Windows programs that kinda run on linux.
Java suffers from that: no "import os" in Java.


Marko