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0 pointsmaxnoe7y ago0 comments

Everytime I hear somebody claim python 3 broke strings I just cringe.

No. No on just so many levels.

It finally fixed it by introducing two (or three if you count bytearray) types for completely different semantics of data.

Python 2 was just a mess whenever you left ascii.

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dataflow7y ago· 2 in thread

Meanwhile I cringe every time I see people say "No" while ignoring the issues people like me point out.

maxnoeOP7y ago

I don't say the transition is easy or maintaining a codebase that handles these issues correct that supports python 3 and 2 at the same time.

But looking solely at python3 , everything byte and unicode related just got so much easier and better testable and with better error messages at better points in your code than in python 2.

So claiming python 3 broke stuff just not what the case is.

Python 2 had a deeply flawed, boundryless view of unicode vs bytes and python 3 fixed that.

dataflow7y ago

So for example what is your rebuttal to my actual example pointing out that "a".encode('unicode_escape') returns bytes instead of strings? Why/how the heck is it even encoding anything when it never even asked me for an encoding? If for nonsensical reasons it really wants to encode things, shouldn't it at least be asking me for an encoding if it wants a "clean separation" between strings and bytes? You find Python 2's behavior of returning a string to be somehow deeply flawed but Python 3's returning of bytes to be sensible? Really? What problem are they solving here?

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