Well, Python 3000 is done and 3.0 has been released. I like a lot
of the changes that have been made to the language. My favorite
is probably the change to make print a function, I've run into many
situations where I would have like to create a class with a print(...)
method but had to settle for a less convenient name.
But today, I'm not here to be positive. I'm going to gripe! Or a least
express a little bit of skepticism. So far there are two things about
the change that I don't quite like. There is the removal of the callable(...)
function. This is minor, but I really don't get it. Maybe I'm weird in that
I was using it pretty often. But it's easy to deal with, just create my
own utility function that does the same thing.
Less easy for me to just deal with, is the change to unicode strings
everywhere. What bugs me isn't that unicode is used as the default, but
that "regular" byte strings have been sort-of deprecated. sys.argv,
sys.stdin and sys.stdout are now "text" based which really doesn't make
sense on Linux/Unix systems. How the hell does the language know that
I'm not piping in binary data? I wouldn't be bothered as much if there
was a bytes equivalent open by default (rawstdin or some such). I
guess I can do something like: "os.fdopen(sys.stdin.fileno(), 'rb')"
but that seems quite
clunky. The old model was simple on unix-like systems, it was obvious
and straightforward.
I hadn't thought much about the issue until I read some messages by
Matt Mackall, the creator of Mercurial, who was complaining about the
change. Personally, I would've gone with byte strings, that always have
an attached encoding which is always defaulted to UTF-8 everywhere. :-)
The fact that there is more than one way
to represent unicode "text" makes it hard to know what the original
byte stream was. This is too bad, because it's nice to be able to write
stupid programs.
