Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu>: > Different OSes *do* have different assumptions. Both MacOSX and > current Windows use (UCS-2 or) UTF-16 for text.
Linux can use anything for text; UTF-8 has become a de-facto standard. How text is represented is very different from whether text is a fundamental data type. A fundamental text file is such that ordinary operating system facilities can't see inside the black box (that is, they are *not* encoded as far as the applications go). I have no idea how opaque text files are in Windows or OS-X. > For Windows, at least, the interface is much improved in Python 3. Yes, I get the feeling that Python is reaching out to Windows and OS-X and trying to make linux look like them. > I understand that some, but not all, Latin alphabet *nix programmers > wish that Python 3 continued to be strongly in their favor. But they > are a small minority of the world's programmers, and Python 3 is aimed > at everyone on all systems. Python allows linux programmers to write native linux programs. Maybe it allows Windows programmers to write native Windows programs. I certainly hope so. I don't want to have to write Windows programs that kinda run on linux. Java suffers from that: no "import os" in Java. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
