Assignment Versus Equality

[Rustom Mody]

On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 11:12:59 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 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"?

We've had this conversation before.
Ive listed these spottinesses
See http://blog.languager.org/2015/03/whimsical-unicode.html
Specifically the section on ½-assed unicode support

> 
> 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? :-)

Here's one (below)
> 
> 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.

Python2 had strings and unicode strings u"..."
Python3 has char-strings and byte-strings b"..." with the char-strings 
uniformly spanning all of unicode.

Not just a significant change in implementation but in mindset

Yet the way you use Unicode in the sentence above implies that while you
*say* 'Unicode' you mean the set Unicode - ASCII which is exactly
Python2 mindset.

So which mindset do you subscribe to?