Rauli Ruohonen writes: > On 6/9/07, Stephen J. Turnbull <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Rauli Ruohonen writes: > > > The ones it absolutely prohibits in interchange are surrogates. > > > > Excuse me? Surrogates are code points with a specific interpretation > > if it is "purported that the stream is in UTF-16". Otherwise, Unicode > > 4.0 explicitly says that there is nothing illegal about an isolated > > surrogate (p.75, where an example is given of how such a surrogate > > might occur). > > I meant interchange instead of strings. Anything is allowed in > strings.
I think you misunderstand. Anything in Unicode that is normative is about interchange. Strings are also a means of interchange---between modules (separate Unicode processes) in a program (single OS process). Python language and library implementation is going to be primarily concerned with interchange in the intermodule sense. Your complaint about Python mixing "pseudo-UTF-16" with "pseudo-UCS-2" is precisely a statement that various modules in Python do not specify what encoding forms they purport to accept or emit. The purpose of the definitions in chapter 3 is to clarify the requirements of conformance. The discussion of strings is implicitly about interchange, otherwise it would be somewhere else than the chapter about conformance. > My understanding is that it is a goal, but practicality beats purity. > I think the only disagreement is on what's practical. It is not a goal of the *language*; there is no object in the *language* that we can say is buggy if it doesn't conform to the Unicode standard. Unicode conformance for Python, as of today, is a WIBNI. As Guido points out, the goal is a language that can be used to write efficient implementations of Unicode *if the users want to pay that cost*, not to provide an implementation so the users don't have to. _______________________________________________ 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
