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[Python-Dev] PEP 460: allowing %d and %f and mojibake

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Jan 14 09:20:27 CET 2014 
Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I've now looked at asciistr. (Thanks Glenn and Ethan for the link.)
> 
> Now that I (hopefully) understand it, I'm worried that a text
> processing algorithm that uses asciistr might under hard-to-predict
> circumstances (such as when the arguments contain nothing of interest
> to the algorithm) might return an asciistr instance instead of a str
> or bytes instance,

It seems to me that any algorithm with that property
has a genuine ambiguity as to what it should return
in that case. Arguably, returning an asciistr would
be the *right* thing to do, because that would allow
it to be used as a component of a larger algorithm
that was polymorphic with respect to text/bytes.

-- 
Greg
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