On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 2:23 AM, Lew Pitcher <lew.pitc...@digitalfreehold.ca> wrote: > Chris Angelico wrote: > >> On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 1:24 AM, Lew Pitcher >> <lew.pitc...@digitalfreehold.ca> wrote: >>> >>> What in "Try changing your target encoding to something other than ASCII" >>> is encouragement to use "old legacy encodings"? >>> >>>> In 2017, unless you are reading from old legacy files created using a >>>> non-Unicode encoding, you should just use UTF-8. >>> >>> Thanks for your opinion. My opinion differs. >> >> So what encoding *do* you recommend, and why is it better than UTF-8? > > I recommend whatever encoding is appropriate for the output. That's not up > to you or me to decide; that's a question that only the OP can answer. > > (Imagine, python on an IBM Zseries running ZOS; the "native" characterset is > one of the EBCDIC variants. Would UTF-8 be a better choice there? )
So if the OP needed to print out a number, would you take a similarly spineless approach and say that only the OP can decide what numeric base to use? Does every fledgeling programmer need to understand about archaic systems where you needed to use BCD for your numbers? EBCDIC derives from BCD, where a single decimal digit was encoded in four bits... and I'm sure you could name systems even less popular, used on important systems back in the 1960s or so. Does a modern Python programmer need to look through all of those possible ways to represent numbers? NO. Today's programmer should need to know about very few ways to represent numbers, in priority order: 1) Decimal digits represented in ASCII 2) Packed binary, network byte order 3) Packed binary, little-endian. A new programmer shouldn't need to worry about anything other than decimal digits, in fact. Of course other systems do exist, like the MIDI "variable length integer" that packs seven bits into a byte and then uses the high bit as a continuation marker; or IEEE 80-bit floating point, or a multi-limb format like GMP uses, but until you actually need to work with it, you don't need to know about it. Just use the one most obvious encoding. UTF-8 for all text. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
