On 7/16/2014 10:27 AM, Frank Millman wrote:
Would this have been so easy using Python2 - I don't think so. What follows is blatant speculation, but it is quite possible that there are many non-English speakers out there that have had their lives made much easier by the changes to Python3 - a 'silent majority'? I don't mean an absolute majority, as I believe there are still more Python2 users than Python3. But of those who have made the switch from 2 to 3, maybe most of them are quite happy. If so, then the python devs got that right as well.
Python3 has helped me cope with unexpected non-ASCII characters in other systems on our university campus while using a program written back before I knew anything about unicode.
When I first spotted mojibake appearing in a student's name and address, it was only a couple of emails and a little investigation to determine which encoding= bits to sprinkle into my program. And I was finished.
I wrote these applications a decade ago in Python2, and never worried about unicode. I translated them to Python3 years ago, and still never worried about unicode. The database is supposed to be sanitized against non-ASCII by an address and name-scrubbing application, which we aspend large amounts of cash on (I don't understand why, but that's what we do).
And thanks to Python3, even though "illegal" characters have crept in, and even though I had never worried about unicode before, I could fix my program(s) the instant I knew which encodings to use. It would have been much harder to get right using Python2.
-- Neil Cerutti -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
