Re: tuples, index method, Python's design

"Rhamphoryncus" <rhamph@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
i = s.index(e) => s[i] = e
Then this algorithm is no longer guaranteed to work with strings.
It never worked correctly on unicode strings anyway (which becomes the
canonical string in python 3.0).

What?! Are you sure? That sounds broken to me.

Nope, it's pretty fundamental to working with text, unicode only being
an extreme example: there's a wide number of ways to break down a
chunk of text, making the odds of "e" being any particular one fairly
low. Python's unicode type only makes this slightly worse, not
promising any particular one is available.

I don't understand this. I thought that unicode was a character
coding system like ascii, except with an enormous character set
combined with a bunch of different algorithms for encoding unicode
strings as byte sequences. But I've thought of those algorithms
(UTF-8 and so forth) as basically being kludgy data compression
schemes, and unicode strings are still just sequences of code points.
.

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