On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:27 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 2:14 PM, Jeroen Demeyer <jdeme...@cage.ugent.be> > wrote: >> On 2017-08-28 12:45, Nicolas M. Thiery wrote: >>> >>> - Are there plans to enforce the above future imports to our doctests? In >>> particular unicode_literals which seems more problematic? >> >> >> TL;DR: I do not consider it a problem that stuff breaks with "from >> __future__ import unicode_literals". >> >> The other __future__ imports (namely absolute_import, division and >> print_function) make certain code behave just like in Python 3. That's good >> in any case for portability. >> >> unicode_literals on the other hand creates a "mixed" environment, which is >> not the same as Python 2 nor the same as Python 3. With unicode_literals, >> it's only string *literals* which become unicode, but other strings still >> behave like plain old strings. I would say that unicode_literals does have >> its uses (if you want to do text processing in unicode both in Python 2 and >> in Python 3), but it's not something that should be turned on blindly. > > Agreed--for certain modules it's very useful, but it harms users on > Python 2 because suddenly lots of strings have the u"" prefix for some > reason (that they don't understand, necessarily) and the overall > experience is disruptive and not backwards compatible. > > I usually try to eschew the <type 'unicode'> as much as possible on > Python 2 except where explicitly needed (e.g. non-ASCII text), but > otherwise keep <type 'str'> as the default string type on both Python > 2 and Python 3 (even though these are very different types despite > having the same name ;)
In fact, I just remembered there was a thread about this a few months ago on python-dev. Even Guido concluded that unicode_literals does more harm than good (I'd still say it's useful in some cases. I think the conclusion of that discussion was to add an admonition against it in the docs :) https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-December/147009.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
