[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ

Sat Dec 6 06:31:51 CET 2008

Nick Coghlan writes:
 > True, but it's still a fairly important problem to have a solution to.
 > Even internally in large organisations there can be some pretty insane
 > environments as cruft accumulates over the years.
M&A and globalization makes it inevitable.
Toshio will remember the Mizuho April Fool's Day fiasco (a couple of
large banks merged, and when they reopened as a merged entity called
"Mizuho", the ATM system immediately crashed).
Japan being a country that doesn't believe in GAAP, such mergers are a
very difficult problem. I don't know the details, but I wouldn't even
be surprised if encodings played a role in that mess because Japanese
companies often have their own internal variants of the national
standard JIS encoding.