4 ms·

Python2 had the 'unicode' class for characters, and the 'str' class for bytes. The whole 2 to 3 debacle was only because somebody thought that naming your stri

• Izkata 4y ago
  Also the default, what a no-prefix string like "foo" meant changed between the two versions.
  • someguydave 4y ago
    Right, essentially the Python developers decided to define a sizable portion of their developer base as "bad people" due to their particular use of the string API and then spent years going to war with them. The war continues to this day apparently with this Debian news. Somehow you can use fortran77 compilers without people getting angry but you can't use Python2
• acdha 4y ago
  It’s not that simple: as the person you’re responding to explained, this was leaky because in simple cases you could pretend those were equivalent but then things would break around interface points when someone introduced things like filenames with Unicode. I had clean Python 2 codebases which had been Unicode-safe for years and had good test coverage, so porting to Python 3 was trivial and mostly automated. The projects which were hard were the sloppy ones which conflated bytes and Unicode, and the poor development culture which lead to that also tended to mean they had limited testing, orphaned dependencies, monkey patching, etc. which made the migration hard. I also found a fair number of cases where that process fixed other bugs which had been ignored for years.