On 06/05/2014 11:30 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >
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).
Of course they are. It may be an ASCII-encoding of some flavor or other, or something really (to me) strange -- but an encoding is most assuredly in affect.
ASCII is *not* the state of "this string has no encoding" -- that would be Unicode; a Unicode string, as a data type, has no encoding. To transport it, store it, etc., it must (usually?) be encoded into something -- utf-8, ASCII, turkish, or whatever subset is agreed upon and will hopefully contain all the Unicode characters needed for the string to be properly represented.
The realization that ASCII was, in fact, an encoding was a big paradigm shift for me, but a necessary one.
-- ~Ethan~ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
