On 8/12/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Wasn't unicodedata.ascii_letters suggested at one point (to eliminate > > the string module), or was that my imagination? > > Not sure - I don't recall such a proposal. > > > IMO, if there is a need for unicode or locale letters, we should > > provide a function to generate them as needed. It can be passed > > directly to set or whatever datastructure is actually needed. We > > shouldn't burden the startup cost with such a large datastructure > > unless absolutely necessary (nor should we use a property to load it > > when first needed; expensive to compute attribute and all that). > > Exactly my feelings. Still, people seem to like string.letters a lot, > and I'm unsure as to why that is.
I think because it feels like the most direct, least obscured approach. Calling ord() feels like a hack, re is overkill and maligned for many reasons, and c.isalpha() would behave differently if passed unicode instead of str. Perhaps we should have a .isasciialpha() and document that as the preferred alternative. Looking over google codesearch results, I don't find myself enamored with the existing string.letters usages. Most can be easily converted to .isalpha/isalnum/isasciialpha/etc. What can't easily be converted could be done using something else, and I don't think warrant use of string.letters given its regular misusage. What's really frightening is the tendency to use string.letters to build regular expressions. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
