On Monday, May 30, 2016 at 12:16:55 AM UTC+5:30, Terry Reedy wrote: > On 5/29/2016 2:12 AM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > > In short that a € costs more than a $ is a combination of the factors > > - a natural cause -- there are a million chars to encode (lets assume that > > the > > million of Unicode is somehow God-given AS A SET) > > - an artificial political one -- out of the million-factorial permutations > > of > > that million, the one that the Unicode consortium chose is towards > > satisfying the > > equation: Keep ASCII users undisturbed and happy > > From the Python developer viewpoint, Unicode might as well be a fact of > nature. I also note that in English text, a (phoneme) char conveys > about 6 bits of information, while in Chinese text, a (word) char > conveys perhaps 15 bits of information. So I argue that Python 3.3+'s > FSR is being fair in using 1 byte for the first and most often 2 bytes > for the other.
Almost a fact of nature -- thats right Im making no complaint against python Or unicode for that matter. Bismarck's well-known quote: Politics is the art of the possible not so well-known additional clause "... the art of the second best" Unicode's relation to ASCII is analogous to C++ relation to C. Ask a typical C++ programmer about style/paradigm etc and you'll hear something unctuous about how C-style is terrible. Then ask why the question of C arises at all when its so unfit and obsolete ie why build C++ on a C base And you'll get vague, philosophical BS on pragmatism etc In short when it suits exploit C, when it suits abuse it. Unicode is likewise: The whole point of unicode is to go beyond ASCII And yet ASCII is allocated the prime real-estate of the lowest 128 of ASCII -- all the control-char wastage preserved intact -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
