[Python-Dev] PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3

[Chris McDonough]

On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 15:23 -0500, R. David Murray wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:50:21 -0500, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:
> > Currently we handle 3.2 compatibility in packages that "straddle" via
> > six-like functions.  We can continue doing this as necessary.  If the
> 
> It seems to me that this undermines your argument in favor of u''.
> Why can't you just continue to do the above for 3.3 and beyond?

I really don't know how long I'll need to do future development in the
subset language of Python 2 and Python 3 because I can't predict the
future.  It could be two years, it might be five.  Who knows.

But I do know that I'm going to be developing in the subset of Python
that currently runs on Python 2 >= 2.6 and Python 3 >= 3.2 for at least
a year.  And that will suck, because that language is a much less fun
language in which to develop than either Python 2 or Python 3.  Frankly,
it's a pretty bad language.

If we make this change now, it means a year from now I'll be able to
develop in a slightly less sucky subset language if I choose to drop
support for 3.2.  And people who don't try to support Python 3 at all
til then will never have to program in the suckiest subset like I will
have had to.

Note that u'' literals are sort of the tip of the iceberg here;
supporting them will obviously not make development under the subset an
order of magnitude less sucky, just a tiny little bit less sucky.  There
are other extremely annoying things, like str(bytes) returning the repr
of a bytestring on Python 3.  That's almost as irritating as the absence
of u'' literals, but we have to evaluate one thing at a time.

- C