Random string samples & unicode - Reprise

[bearophile]

Jonathan M Davis:

> It's not necessarily a bad idea,

I don't know if it's a good idea.


> but I'm not sure that we want to encourage code 
> that assumes ASCII. It's far too easy for English-speaking programmers to end up 
> making that assumption in their code and then they run into problems later when 
> they unexpectedly end up with unicode characters in their input, or they have to 
> change their code to work with unicode.

On the other hand there are situations when you know you are dealing just with digits, or few predetermined symbols like ()+-*/", or when you process very large biological strings that are composed by a restricted and limited number of different ASCII chars.

Bye,
bearophile