On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 2:59 PM, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Some evidences of leakiness: > code point vs character vs byte > encoding and decoding > UTF-x and UCS-y > > Very important and necessary distinctions? Maybe... But I did not need > them when my world was built of the 127 bricks of ASCII.
Codepoint vs byte is NOT an abstraction. Unicode consists of characters, where each character is represented by a number called its codepoint. Since computers work with bytes, we need a way of encoding those characters into bytes. It's no different from encoding a piece of music in bytes, and having it come out as 0x90 0x64 0x40. Are those bytes an abstraction of the note? No. They're an encoding of a MIDI message that requests that the note be struck. The note itself is an abstraction, if you like; but the bytes to create that note could be delivered in a variety of other ways. A Python Unicode string, whether it's Python 2's 'unicode' or Python 3's 'str', is a sequence of characters. Since those characters are stored in memory, they must be encoded somehow, but that's not our problem. We need only care about encoding when we save those characters to disk, transmit them across the network, or in some other way need to store them as bytes. Otherwise, there is no abstraction, and no leak. Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
