Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2

Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by raverbashing on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @03:46AM (#22932891)

> py2’s flexibility to handle utf8 bytes without fuss is amazing

Without fuzz? No, sorry, it was anything but.

First of all it would default encoding to "ASCII". Have any whiff of non-explicitly handled UTF-8 and it would just go bang at the worse time possible.

That was a stupid decision

"Oh but there was setdefaultencoding" Yeah here's the first result for that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3828723/why-should-we-no...

So no, Python2 way of dealing with Unicode was the most annoying way possible, because hey who needs anything but ASCII right?

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by pdonis on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @03:30PM (#22938489)

> Python2 way of dealing with Unicode was the most annoying way possible

The part about defaulting to ASCII is annoying, yes. And using sys.setdefaultencoding to change the default would still be annoying, yes. The reason for that is that any default encoding will be annoying whenever the actual encoding when the program is running doesn't match the default.

The correct way to fix this problem is to not have a default encoding at all. Don't try to auto-detect encodings; don't try to guess encodings. Force every encode and decode operation to explicitly specify an encoding. That way the issue of what the encoding is, how to detect it, etc., is handled in the right place--in the code of the particular application that needs to use Unicode. It should not be handled in a language runtime or a standard library, precisely because there is no way for a language runtime or a library to properly deal with all use cases of all applications.

What Python 3 did, instead, was to change the rules of default encodings and auto-detection/guessing of encodings, so that they were nicer to some use cases, and even more annoying than before to others.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by ehsankia on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @04:08AM (#22932990)

I agree that it was easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and if you did have to deal with unicode, it was often a pain, but at the same time, Python's simplicity and ease of use is what makes it great, with the ability to do something cleaner if you choose to. You can choose to type annotate all your code and make it better. You can choose to organize your code in however package structure you want or keep it all in one file. The language doesn't force any of that onto you. That's the approach I think would've been much nicer and Pythonic in my mind. Now you're forced to use a much clunkier bytes/str paradigm, which yes will make your life much nicer in the 10% of the time when you'll need it, but the other 90% of the time will just be slightly more annoying. Similarly, I may be alone in this, but having to put parens around print statements is also annoying 99% of the time, but nice that 1% of the time I need to pass it as a function or pass it some extra arguments.

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Re:Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2 by scoot_718 on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @11:07PM (#23014862)

> Have any whiff of non-explicitly handled UTF-8 and it would just go bang at the worse time possible.

Whereas python3 is just waiting to explode the moment there are bytes in your UTF-8 that are invalid.

Oh the http request got truncated to leave invalid utf-8 in an otherwise fine utf-8 response? FUCKING ERROR.

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