Python under PowerShell adds characters

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 11:14 AM, Steve D'Aprano
<steve+python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Just like the rest of the computation. Relatively few command-line
> computations are performed by machines, for machines, using
> machine-friendly human-hostile formats.

And even most computations performed by machines for machines are done
using human-friendly transmission formats. Trying to brain-storm
actually human-hostile formats... let's see. There's extremely
low-level protocols like IP, TCP, DNS, and X11. There are
(de)compression tools like gzip, where byte size is the entire point
of the utility. There's XML, of course, which isn't exactly
machine-friendly, but is pretty human-hostile. And most crypto is done
with byte streams rather than text. Beyond that, pretty much
everything is text. Ever since I started git-managing my /etc
directory, I've been seeing changes made by various programs being
reflected there - in text files. Internet protocols are almost
exclusively text. Unless you say otherwise, most Unix utilities
consume and emit text, even when they're in "machine readable" mode -
for example, a number of git commands support a "--porcelain" option
that removes color codes and pretty formatting, and also uses a format
that's guaranteed to be stable, but it's still text.

Despite fundamentally working with bit operations and numbers,
computers today are still heavily text-aligned. Might have something
to do with the fact that they're programmed by humans...

ChrisA