Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >> Py3's byte strings are still strings, though. > > Hm. I don't think so. In a plain English sense, maybe, but that kind of > usage can lead to confusion.
Only if you are determined to confuse yourself. People are quite capable of interpreting correctly sentences like: "My friend Susan and I were talking about Jenny, and she said that she had had a horrible fight with her boyfriend and was breaking up with him." and despite the ambiguity correctly interpret who "she" and "her" refers to each time. Compared to that, correctly understanding the mild complexity of "string" is trivial. In Python usage, "string" always refers to the `str` type, unless prefixed with "byte", in which case it refers to the immutable byte-string type (`str` in Python 2, `bytes` in Python 3.) "Unicode string" always refers to the immutable Unicode string type (`unicode` in Python 2, `str` in Python 3). "Text string" is more ambiguous. Some people consider the prefix to be redundant, e.g. "text string" always refers to `str`, while others consider it to be in opposition to "byte string", i.e. to be a synonym for "Unicode string". In all cases apart from an explicit "byte string", the word "string" is always used for the native array-of-characters type delimited by plain quotation marks, as used for error messages, user prompts, etc., regardless whether the implementation is an array of 8-bit bytes (as used by Python 2), or the full Unicode character set (as used by Python 3). So in practice, provided you know which version of Python is being discussed, there is never any genuine ambiguity when using the word "string" and no excuse for confusion. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
