David Hopwood schrieb: >> The PEP doesn't deal with streams. It is about files. > > An important part of the Unix design philosophy (partially adopted by Windows) > is to make streams and files behave as similarly as possible. It is quite > feasible to make *some* detection algorithms work for streams, and this is > an advantage over algorithms that don't work for streams.
There is nothing wrong with that principle. But it's just a principle. Depending on the kind of stream, different technologies for detecting the encoding are necessary. For example, on a Win32 terminal, a special API is available to determine the encoding. On a Unix interactive terminal, the locale's encoding should be assumed (and more so than for regular files: for a file, the user may chose a different encoding; for the console, the encoding is close to (sic) a hardware setting that cannot be changed). The Unix principle is often extended to reach into areas where it really becomes inadequate, look at Plan 9 for an example. Wrt. byte streams and encodings, the principle works only if all applications use the same encoding (which they do on Plan 9). Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
