[Info-vax] ODS-5 specifications, was: Re: Does OpenVMS Use Unicode?

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 12:38:33 AM UTC+12, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> It'll also break existing code, which gets back to 
> my usual comments on the double-edged nature of compatibility, when you 
> finally get around to actually needing whatever was implemented in a 
> "compatible" fashion, or when you just can't make changes without 
> breaking existing code.  Adding UTF-8 is either going to break 
> applications, or it's going to be an incredibly convoluted design.

Interestingly, Python went through these sorts of throes. Python 2 had “strings” (which were made up of 8-bit bytes), to which were added “unicode strings” as a separate type. This was deemed to be much too unwieldy and complicated, so Python 3 bit the backward-incompatibility bullet, and defined “strings” to be Unicode, while 8-bit bytes were to be kept in “bytes” objects.

Python 2 was villified for its horrible Unicode support. Then Python 3 was villified for not making it painless to move from version 2 to version 3...