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[Python-Dev] PEP 460 reboot

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Jan 13 22:24:00 CET 2014 
Glenn Linderman wrote:
> Quotes in the stream are a great debug hint, without blowing up.

But do you really want those quotes turning up in
a *binary* stream, where they're somewhere between
awkward and near-impossible to spot by eyeballing,
and may only be discovered when something else --
likely a different program, possibly being run
by a different person -- tries to read the data
back, and blows up because the binary format is
corrupted?

I'd much rather it blew up at the writing stage,
myself. Corrupted binary data is *much* harder to
debug than corrupted text, because binary formats
typically have little to no margin for error
before they become complete garbage.

-- 
Greg
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