5 ms·

no you can't. Unicode by default is a complete pain in the butt when working with libraries that want bytes. It's just a complete mess.

int_19h 10y ago
That's because it's not unneeded complexity. Making you stop and think about what you're doing when you say "just treat these bytes as a string" (or vice versa) is to prevent buggy code that only works properly with Latin-1, and similar kind of thing. If some library messes it up, and requires you to provide bytes that are semantically a string, it's a design flaw in the library.
- vegabook 10y ago
  okay try and use any networking library such as zmq, and see what a pain in the butt it is, most definitely refuting the idea that "you can write python 2.7 code if you want". You're going to be polluting your code with .encode .decode all over the shop. Same with xrange, dict access. All sorts of cruft has been introduced in the pursuit of "seriousness". And now we have this post (and most of the comments) saying that 3's flagship win, asyncio, is actually a dog. I reluctantly moved to 3 last year and honestly, I cannot find any wins whatsoever. Seriously considering Lua, although it also has its 5.3 v 5.2 problems not to mention Luajit "fork".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 10y ago
    > You're going to be polluting your code with .encode .decode all over the shop. Well, do those encode/decode calls serve a purpose? Does encoding matter? If so, they're not cruft - they do something that needs to be done. You may dislike the fact that it's extra complexity, but any speaker of a language for which ASCII (or Latin-1) is not sufficient will rejoice knowing that you can't write code that breaks when we try to use it anymore. I remember how much of a hassle this kind of stuff was back in DOS/Win9x days, and even in early 00s; and I also remember how a hard push for Unicode as the string encoding in mainstream languages like Java and C# did a lot to rectify that. If not, then why would you need to encode something just to decode it later, or vice versa? Why not just pass bytes/bytearray around? Again, if the library requires doing so (because they demand the data to be passed as a str specifically, even though it's never actually treated as a string), then that's a bug in said library, and you should complain to/about its authors instead.

int_19h 10y ago

That's because it's not unneeded complexity. Making you stop and think about what you're doing when you say "just treat these bytes as a string" (or vice versa) is to prevent buggy code that only works properly with Latin-1, and similar kind of thing. If some library messes it up, and requires you to provide bytes that are semantically a string, it's a design flaw in the library.

vegabook 10y ago
okay try and use any networking library such as zmq, and see what a pain in the butt it is, most definitely refuting the idea that "you can write python 2.7 code if you want". You're going to be polluting your code with .encode .decode all over the shop. Same with xrange, dict access. All sorts of cruft has been introduced in the pursuit of "seriousness". And now we have this post (and most of the comments) saying that 3's flagship win, asyncio, is actually a dog. I reluctantly moved to 3 last year and honestly, I cannot find any wins whatsoever. Seriously considering Lua, although it also has its 5.3 v 5.2 problems not to mention Luajit "fork".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 10y ago
  > You're going to be polluting your code with .encode .decode all over the shop. Well, do those encode/decode calls serve a purpose? Does encoding matter? If so, they're not cruft - they do something that needs to be done. You may dislike the fact that it's extra complexity, but any speaker of a language for which ASCII (or Latin-1) is not sufficient will rejoice knowing that you can't write code that breaks when we try to use it anymore. I remember how much of a hassle this kind of stuff was back in DOS/Win9x days, and even in early 00s; and I also remember how a hard push for Unicode as the string encoding in mainstream languages like Java and C# did a lot to rectify that. If not, then why would you need to encode something just to decode it later, or vice versa? Why not just pass bytes/bytearray around? Again, if the library requires doing so (because they demand the data to be passed as a str specifically, even though it's never actually treated as a string), then that's a bug in said library, and you should complain to/about its authors instead.