News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Python Unicode Mess. Parent comment

Re:The Python Unicode Mess by mehrdadn on Saturday October 06, 2018 @05:56PM (#18157489)
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...
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Python Unicode Mess by steveklabnik on Saturday October 06, 2018 @09:14PM (#18158339)
Yeah, that might be better, good point.
[ Parent | on HN ]