Okay, I have a confession: I continue to write Python programs thatdeal with text (to some degree) but which are not Unicode-aware in theapproved manner. One of the reasons that I do this is that I can getaway with it, but another reason is that not doing Unicode is easierthan doing Unicode.

I don't mean this in the sense that there's less code if you don'tdo Unicode. I mean that doing Unicode confronts you with moredecisions. When

From one perspective, ideally SSL would be split apart into encryptionand trust, with the goal of letting you have encryption withouttrust. In theory you could achieve this with a different handling ofhttps , but lately I have come to think that the user expectation problems of such a solutionare insurmountable at this point; too many people just know what httpsin URLs means for its meaning to change (in a subtle way).

(My personal feeling is that it is pointless and even undesirable to gothe other way

Suppose that you have what I will call a 'directive style' configurationfile, where it looks something like (say):

fileserver fs1exportto hostsa:hostsbfilesys /h/10 fs1/d100filesys /h/11 fs1/d110

Further, suppose that you want to do things with this configuration filein a Bourne shell script, which requires parsing it to extract all of theinformation that you're interested in.

Normally this would be a pain