"Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> People who want to use the feature would have to know that it is only > >> present if you turn it on. It's like saying "you can use hexadecimal > >> integer literals, but you have to turn them on". This wouldn't work: > >> people try to use them, find out that it won't work, and assume > >> that it's not supported. > > > > Are we going to stop offering informational error messages to people? > > Because an informational error message could go a long way towards > > helping people to understand what is going on. > > I don't think there is precedence in Python for such an informational > error message. It is not pythonic to give an error in the case > "I know what you want, and I could easily do it, but I don't feel > like doing it, read these ten pages of text to learn more about the > problem".
ImportError("non-ascii names used without proper charset definition") They hop online, enter that phrase into google, and (hopefully) get a page at python.org that says something like... If you have received this error, and merely want to get your source to run, use: python --charset=unicode ... If you know the character set of the source you want to run (which can be discovered by checking the output of scripts/charset.py), you can use: python --charset=<charset> ... If you would like to make this the default, add a PY_CHARSET environment variable with a comma separated list of allowable character sets (ascii is always included). If you would like to programmatically change the allowable character set, use the <charset modification module> . > The most similar case is the future import statement, where we in fact > report an error even though it's typically clear what the desired > meaning of the program is. However, this statement is only meant > as a transitional measure, with a view of eventually changing > the error into making the future behavior the default. I understand > that you want that to be a permanent error, and this I object to. That's fine, but it's not just me that has this opinion and desire for ascii default behavior. > People should not have to read long system configuration pages > just to run the program that they intuitively wrote correctly > right from the start. You mean that 5% of users who run into code written using non-ascii identifiers will find this sufficiently burdensome to force the 95% of ascii users to use additional verification and checking tools to make sure that they are not confronted with non-ascii identifiers? I don't find that a reasonable tradeoff for the majority of (non-unicode) users. - Josiah _______________________________________________ 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