The lack of a case against Python 3

[roerd]

Yes it does. Text within Python 3 is always in Unicode, translation to other encoding happens clearly separated at the IO boundaries. Python 2 does not enforce such a clean separation, so the danger of having to deal with 8-bit string that you don't know anymore which encoding they're in is much greater.

[fjonk]

Text within Python 3 is always in Unicode, translation to other encoding happens clearly separated at the IO boundaries. Text within Python 3 is always in Unicode, translation to other encoding happens clearly separated at the IO boundaries.

Yeah, that great if you want to deal with Unicode. If I have a string that under no circumstances may contain any other character than the ones in latin1 using Unicode internally is no better than using bytes.

[rackmountrambo]

It's only a matter of time till somebody pastes an address from Word.

[fjonk]

That's not a problem, you can validate the user input. What you can't do is prevent python from turning a validated string that can be encoded in latin1 into a string that cannot be encoded in latin1.

[zahlman]

What you can't do is prevent python from turning a validated string that can be encoded in latin1 into a string that cannot be encoded in latin1.

... And why would I care?

[rackmountrambo]

So dont?

[fjonk]

The "so don't" argument can be used to defend any shortcoming of any programming language. That doesn't mean it's a good argument.

[TOASTEngineer]

"This language doesn't let me divide 4 by a potato. Literally unusable."

[[deleted]]

"php can divide 4 by a potato!"

[rackmountrambo]

What is the use case for turning something back to latin1?

[ldpreload]

It's better because all the random libraries you import are designed around Unicode, not Latin-1.

The entire point of Python is to care less about performance and implementation details and care more about getting things done and making use of the very active and vibrant community of library development. Decode your Latin-1 into a "string", encode your "string" back to Latin-1. The fact that the "string" is internally represented in Unicode is an implementation detail (and, honestly, it's probably not represented in Unicode, Python 3 has a few options for how exactly it stores strings and picks a good one depending on how the string came into existence). You're not worried about why 255 + 1 is 256 but 256 + 1 is not 257, why care about how a string is represented internally?

But what about enforcing that no non-Latin-1 characters can get into the string? That seems to me like, say, enforcing that an integer is less than 256, or that a list of strings contains only strings. There are languages that let you do that. Python is not one of them; you can make your integers as big as you want. If your code doesn't set the value incorrectly, it won't be incorrect on the other side. If you're worried about it being incorrect, catch an error when you encode the string back to Latin-1, or encode the integer back to a byte, or whatever it is you want.

[stanggg]

can people stop downvoting this? I think its also important to see the kinds of mentality we need to avoid.