On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 11:58 AM, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: >>> I'm not much interested in Unicode at the minute. I'll pass. > > >> Your final comment sums up perfectly your knowledge of computing in >> 2016. > > > You're utterly determined to belittle everything I do aren't you! > > But, yeah, I was writing international applications decades ago. I'm not > working for anyone now and don't need to bother. > > From what I've seen, a lot of software can't get it right anyway.
That would be because a lot of software is written by people who don't understand Unicode. "But other people get it wrong too!" wasn't a valid excuse when I was in grade school, and it still isn't in real-world work. [1] If you are writing code in 2016 that assumes that a byte is the same thing as a character, and speak as if this is alright, then yes, we WILL belittle you for it. It's on par with thinking that an integer is a 16-bit signed two's complement number. Sure, back in the 1990s, you could probably get away with that (and you'll find a lot of games that flip at 32,767 or 65,535 - or, in one that I remember, at 3,276,700!), but nobody today would let you pretend that those are identical. Neither is a list identical to a coherent block of memory (the way a C array often is implemented) - and neither is a text string identical to a stream of bytes. Even if you're restricting your text to the ASCII set, there is still an encoding involved; a typical C string's encoding is "one character per byte, followed by 0x00", whereas a Pascal string's encoding might be "one character per byte, preceded by the character count, represented in a single byte". Every encoding has consequences, every encoding has costs. You can't get away from this. You can't pretend that you don't have an encoding. ChrisA [1] Except when you're specifically writing compatibility code, where getting it identically wrong means your program successfully interoperates with someone else's buggy code. But if you're doing that, I pity you. That is not a fun job to have. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
