[Python-Dev] thoughts on the bytes/string discussion

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/24/2010 4:59 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> But I wouldn't go so far as to claim that interpreting the protocols
> as text is wrong. After all we're talking exclusively about protocols
> that are designed intentionally to be directly "human readable"

I agree that the claim "':' is just a byte" is a bit shortsighted.

If the designers of the protocols had intended to use uninterpreted 
bytes as protocol markers, they could and I suspect would have used 
unused control codes, of which there are several. Then there would have 
been no need for escape mechanisms to put things like :<> into content text.

I am very sure that the reason for specifying *ascii* byte values was to 
be crysal clear as to what *character* was meant and to *exclude* use on 
the internet of the main imcompatible competitor encoding -- IBM's 
EBCDIC -- which IBM used in all of *its* networks. Until the IBM PC came 
out in the early 1980s (and IBM originally saw that as a minor sideline 
and something of a toy), there was a battle over byte encodings between 
IBM and everyone else.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy