Why do people say "bag" instead of string/sequence/vector/array/list/etc.? Bags are multisets... they're by definition unordered. It's already a niche technical term so it's really weird to see it used differently in a technical context...
Re:The Python Unicode Mess
by steveklabnik on Saturday October 06, 2018 @06:49PM
(#18157760)
I think it feels really evocative. Like, a bag of dice or something. You can’t see what’s inside, you have no idea what’s on them. It reinforces the “no encoding” thing well.
Re:The Python Unicode Mess
by jschwartzi on Saturday October 06, 2018 @08:44PM
(#18158221)
I think it is more eloquently stated that "you shouldn't make assumptions about what's inside." Saying "you can't see what's inside" ignores the biggest cause of the conflation. Userspace tools allow you to trivially interpret the bag of bytes as a text string for the purpose of naming it for other people.
Re:The Python Unicode Mess
by steveklabnik on Saturday October 06, 2018 @09:14PM
(#18158339)
Yeah, that might be better, good point.
They’re conversions because they’re not UTF-8 in the first place, that is, they’re not String/str. The conversions are as cheap as we can make them. That language is meant to talk about converting from OsString to String, not from the OS to OsString.