Assignment Versus Equality

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tuesday 28 June 2016 14:31, Rustom Mody wrote:

> On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 6:36:06 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Tue, 28 Jun 2016 12:23 am, Rustom Mody wrote:
>> > Also how is GG deliberately downgrading clear unicode content to be kind
>> > to obsolete clients at recipient end different from python 2 → 3 making
>> > breaking changes but not going beyond ASCII lexemes?
>> 
>> Oh yes, I completely agree, obviously GvR is literally worse than Hitler
>> because he hasn't added a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for
>> input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to
>> Python.
>> 
>> /s
> 
> Gratuitous Godwin acceleration produceth poor sarcasm -- try again
> And while you are at it try and answer the parallel:
> Unicode has a major pro and con
> Pro: Its a superset and enormously richer than ASCII

Correct.

> Con: It is costly and implementations are spotty

That's a matter of opinion. What do you mean by "spotty"?

It seems to me that implementations are mostly pretty good, at least as good as 
Python 2 narrow builds. Support for astral characters is not as good, but 
(apart from some Han users, and a few specialist niches) not as import either.

The big problem is poor tooling: fonts still have many missing characters, and 
editors don't make it easy to enter anything not visible on the keyboard.


> GG downgrades posts containing unicode if it can, thereby increasing reach to
> recipients with unicode-broken clients

And how does that encourage clients to support Unicode? It just enables 
developers to tell themselves "It's just a few weirdos and foreigners who use 
Unicode, ASCII [by which they mean Latin 1] is good enough for everyone."

Its 2016, and it is *way* past time that application developers stop pandering 
to legacy encodings by making them the default. If developers saw that 99% of 
emails were UTF-8, they would be less likely to think they could avoid learning 
about Unicode.

 
> Likewise this:
> 
>> a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for
>> input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to
>> Python.
> 
> sounds like the same logic applied to python
> 
> JFTR I am not quarrelling with Guido's choices; just pointing out your
> inconsistencies

Oh, it's inconsistencies plural is it? So I have more than one? :-)

In Python 3, source files are treated as UTF-8 by default. That means, if you 
want to use Unicode characters in your source code (for variable names, 
comments, or in strings) you can, and you don't have to declare a special 
encoding. Just save the file in an editor that defaults to UTF-8, and Python is 
satisfied. If, for some reason, you need some legacy encoding, you can still 
explicitly set it with a coding cookie at the top of the file.

That behaviour is exactly analogous to my position that mail and news clients 
should default to UTF-8. But in neither case would people be *required* to 
include Unicode characters in their text.


-- 
Steve