Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/15/2018 4:09 PM, Jim Lee wrote:
> 
> 
> On 07/15/18 12:37, MRAB wrote:
>> To me, Unicode and UTF-8 aren't things to be reserved for I18N. I use 
>> them as a matter of course because I find it a lot easier to stick 
>> with just one encoding, one that will work with _any_ text I have.
> 
> Which is exactly the same rationale for using any other single encoding 
> (including ASCII).  If the text you deal with is not multi-lingual, why 
> complicate matters by trying to support a plethora of encodings which 
> will never be used (and the attendant opportunity for more bugs)?

What you are describing -- supporting hundreds of encodings with 
occasional bugs, including multiple encodings in a single string -- 
describes the text as bytes mess.  Switching to unicode strings was a 
vast simplification.  Being able to dump the hundreds of byte encoding 
would be a further simplification, but it will be decades or more before 
we can do that ;-)

> Note that I'm *not* saying Unicode  is *bad*, just that it's an 
> unnecessary complication for a great deal of programming tasks.

I do not understand what you mean by 'unicode is complication'.  From 
the viewpoint of core developers, it is a simplification.

> For a 
> great deal more, it's absolutely necessary.  That why I said a "smart" 
> language would make it easy to turn on and off.

What you mean by 'turn unicode off'?

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy