On 5/25/07, Josiah Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > a default character set that is allowed. The only character set that > makes sense as a default, ignoring previously-existing environment > variables (which don't necessarily help us), is ascii.
This is ignoring the movement in the last 5-10 years that happened in both the operating systems, filesystems and even language space. Now, the "standard" allowed charset in all of the above environments is Unicode. > Why? Primarily because ascii identifiers are what are allowed today, > and have been allowed for 15 years. But there is this secondary data And guess what, they will still be allowed tomorrow... (tongue-in-cheek) If you look at the typical use case for programs written in python (usually also in rough order of experience) A) directly in interpreter (i love that) B) small-ish one-off scripts C) middle size scripts D) multi-module programs made by a single person E) large-ish programs made by a group of people Out of these, really only people belonging to category E) are expressing an opinion that identifiers should stay ASCII forever. Those should be the same people who have a strong source code compliance policy, unit test, lint-izatoin etc... Unicode support out of the box without constraint strongly benefits category A-D. (just for the funny story, I was asking the opinion of my colleague this morning who is a beginner in Visual Basic.NET about Japanese identifiers, and he was shocked to hear that Python does not accept Japanese identifiers today out of the box... VB.NET apparently does and entry level programmers here DO (ab?)use this). Unicode is an accepted norm isn't it? (even if some extremists in Japan long argue of the superiority of the local encoding over Unicode but apart on 2ch this is an old story now) I think Martin's and my point is that to get people to level E) there is no reason to put any charset restriction on level A ->D. And when you are at level E), it is difficult to argue that making a one-time test at source code checkin time is a bad practice. Regards, Guillaume _______________________________________________ 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
