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by smnrchrds 4603 days ago
Maybe not in the world of ASCII, but the new Unicode system scream seems pretty loud to me.

When I decided to use pelican for a non-English blog, I thought it would be piece of cake; just changing the theme and plugging a calendar converter and I would be done with it. In reality, I had to fork pelican and the calendar library (which was not well-maintained) and bang my head to the wall for three days to make them work together, all because of the whole string/unicode seperation and the fact that things work automagically as long as you're just using ASCII.
1 comments
gcr 4602 days ago
Does this get easier or harder in python 3?

I like the explicit separation that Racket has between "here is a buffer of binary data" and "here is a sequence of Unicode characters," and (looking on the outside without working with it), I'm glad that Python 3 began to adopt some of that.

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rspeer 4602 days ago
smnrchrds's case of fixing someone else's ASCII assumption gets easier, because the code probably would not have been written that way.

In Python 2, it's really easy to write code that confuses bytes and characters, which introduces bugs and crashes when non-ASCII characters show up.

In Python 3, they made it easier to work with Unicode, because it's the default for everything, and much harder to confuse bytes and characters, because of that separation between the data types.

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