[Python-Dev] PEP 383 (again)

[Antoine Pitrou]

Thomas Breuel <tmbdev <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> The error checking isn't necessarily deficient.  For example, a safe and
legitimate thing to do is for third party libraries to throw a C++ exception,
raise a Python exception, or delete the half surrogate.

Do you have any concrete examples of this behaviour? When e.g. Nautilus shows
some illegal UTF-8 filenames in an UTF-8 locale, it replaces the offending bytes
with placeholders rather than crash in your face.

> PEP 383 is a proposal that suggests changing Python such that malformed
unicode strings become a required part of Python and such that Pyhon writes
illegal UTF-8 encodings to UTF-8 encoded file systems.

That's again a misleading statement.
It only writes an "illegal encoding" if it received one from the filesystem in
the first place. A clean filesystem will only receive clean filenames.

>  Those are big changes, and it's legitimate to ask that PEP 383 address the
implications of that choice before it's made.

No, it's legitimate to ask that /you/ back up your arguments with concrete
facts. It's difficult to demonstrate the non-existence of a problem. On the
other hand, you can easily demonstrate that it exists, if it really does.

By the way, most of those libraries under Unix would take a char * as input, so
they wouldn't deal with an "illegal unicode string", they would deal with the
original byte string.

Regards

Antoine.