Terry Reedy writes: > If FOOTR is using PUA chars, then I believe that users should not > be providing such a stream as it would have no defined meaning > coming from them.
But that's precisely what "private use" means: the users provide their own definitions! The Unicode standard provides that if a process doesn't know what those characters mean, it *must* pass them through *unchanged*, on the assumption that they will eventually reach a user who knows what they mean. So this means that (to conform to Unicode) every Python program must take responsibility for ensuring that it tracks every filename to be sure that no internal-use PUA characters make it to the "outside world" where they will be propagated indefinitely by conforming processes. This is a substantial burden. This is precisely the advantage of UTF-8b: the first conforming process that catches any escapees will scream bloody murder and turn them over to the Spanish Inquisition, who will torture them on the rack until they confess that Python did it.<wink> _______________________________________________ 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
