Newbie question about text encoding

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:
>
>> '\udd00' should be a SyntaxError.
>
> I find your argument convincing, that attempting to construct a Unicode
> string of a lone surrogate should be an error.
>
> Shouldn't the error type be a ValueError, though? The statement is not,
> to my mind, erroneous syntax.

For the string literal, I would say SyntaxError is more appropriate
than ValueError, as a string object has to be constructed at
compilation time.

I'd still like to see a report from someone who has used a language
that specifically disallows all surrogates in strings. Does it help?
Is it more hassle than it's worth? Are there weird edge cases that it
breaks?

ChrisA