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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 8/14/19 7:19 AM, Niall Douglas
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:8e648c26-cb82-f7bf-64f7-d1f6e5e35255@nedprod.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Lots of great points earlier. I mostly agree with them.
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">I would support such a thing. All other languages went there and it
works great for them. Python will for example assume utf8 in the absence
of pragma.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
This will be probably an underappreciated point: Python started off
pre-Unicode, same as C++, and later on switched the default from "your
current C locale" (i.e. only 7-bit ASCII was portable) into utf-8.
Their world did not end. Some users complained, sure, but because it was
announced in advance, and one could pragma opt-out, it was fine.</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>I suggest you read <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://snarky.ca/why-python-3-exists">https://snarky.ca/why-python-3-exists</a>. Some
choice quotes:<br>
</p>
<p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<h1 id="wewillneverdothiskindofbackwardsincompatiblechangeagain">We
will never do this kind of backwards-incompatible change again</h1>
We have decided as a team that a change as big as <code>unicode</code>/<code>str</code>/<code>bytes</code>
will never happen so abruptly again. When we started Python 3 we
thought/hoped that the community would do what Python did and do
one last feature release supporting Python 2 and then cut over
to Python 3 development for feature development while doing
bugfix releases only for the Python 2 version. That obviously
didn't happen and we have learned our lesson.</blockquote>
I think the lesson we should take from Python3 is that caution is
warranted and that we need to be (as always) very careful about
changing the semantics of existing code.<br>
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cite="mid:8e648c26-cb82-f7bf-64f7-d1f6e5e35255@nedprod.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
C++ could do with being bolder in becoming simpler and less surprising
for end users. It is not unreasonable for a German to type an umlaut
into a string literal, and expect that C++ source code to be portable
and unsurprising by default.</pre>
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<p>Personally, I appreciate that the C++ committee is sensitive to
backward compatibility. I agree we need to make things easier for
programmers, and there are steps we can take that don't require a
utf-8-all-the-things approach.<br>
</p>
<p>Tom.</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:8e648c26-cb82-f7bf-64f7-d1f6e5e35255@nedprod.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Niall
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</pre>
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