Hi, Am Mittwoch, den 03.02.2016, 23:39 -0500 schrieb Gershom B:
Backwards compatibility is important, but not an absolute. I’d be curious if anyone can point to instances where software might _rely_ on the show instance for strings not displaying unicode characters?
some people do use Show and Read as a quick-and-easy serialization/deserialization method, and some of them might assume that only ASCII characters are in use, so they maybe did not bother taking encodings in account when writing them out or in. There are many disencouraged practices mentioned in the above paragraph, but unfortunately, it’s our users that do disencouraged practices that most likely would not pay attention to breaking code changes in the standard libraries, are least likely to update their code and thus be hit the worst. It’s a pitty, and it should be added to the list of things to do better with the next larger language revision (if such a thing ever happens). Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim “nomeata” Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org