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Is 0 > None?? (fwd) (fwd)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at home.com
Tue Sep 4 15:01:52 EDT 2001 
"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message
news:mailman.999590525.31032.python-list at python.org...
a long message on the meaning of

 >     UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

Ok, Alex, at least I get it now.  To summarize:

A. Python lets me put any 8-bit pattern in any position ('char') of a
string (ie, it's 8-bit clean).
It assumes that I know what I am doing for the calculations and
interactions with other systems and programs that I intend to do.

B. By default default, when asked (directly or indirectly) to
interpret a string as a string of chars, Python (the interpreter) only
understands the 7-bit ASCII chars.  If asked to interpret a
high-bit-set pattern, it literally does not know what that pattern
means, and so, rather than guess, it stops with the above error
message.

Terry J. Reedy
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