Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>
>> On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:54 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>>> True enough. Modern-day protocols as well as Linux file formats and
>>> commands intentionally blur the line between strings and bytes. The
>>> software in question deals with all of the above. It is virtually
>>> impossible to keep track of what is "really" text and what is "really"
>>> binary. In the end, the Gordian Knot was sliced by using Python3's
>>> strings for everything and restricting oneself to Latin-1 codepoints
>>> (almost) everywhere.
>>
>> [...] By recommending and preferring eight-bit text strings, you're
>> saying "Chinese text doesn't matter". And by stipulating Latin-1,
>> you're also saying "Russian text doesn't matter" and "Thai text
>> doesn't matter" and "Hebrew text doesn't matter" and more. You are
>> declaring that YOUR culture is the only one that matters. When I see
>> behaviour like that in a Twitch stream that I moderate, I smack it
>> with a banhammer, because that is utterly unacceptable. Why should we
>> tolerate it in programming?
>
> I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that I'm using Python3
> strings as holders for bytes. Since every byte is a valid Unicode code
> point, a Python3 string can hold any sequence of bytes.

Since every byte is also a valid IEEE 754 64-bit binary floating point
value, a sequence of floats can hold any sequence of bytes, too. Is it
a good idea to use floats to represent bytes?

Text strings and sequences of bytes *are different*. If you're going
to try to blur the line, you do NOT want Latin-1. You *might* be able
to do this with ASCII, but you cannot use an eight-bit character set.

> Couldn't you use bytes objects everywhere for the same purpose?
>
> Yes and no.
>
> Yes, but it would be ugly as hell and would involve changing a large
> percentage of the source code.
>
> No, as a large number of Python3 facilities require str objects as
> arguments. Consider urllib.request.urlopen(), for example, which
> requires a URL to be an str object.

Well, duh. It also doesn't accept a list of floats, just because you
COULD represent a text string that way.

ChrisA