[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Guido van Rossum added the comment: I have no desire or time to continue this discussion. The ASCII assumption will be ingrained as deeply or deeper in 3.0 than in 2.x, just like 8-bit bytes and 2's complement. The computer industry has chosen, and there just isn't any incentive to invent abstractions for properties that are constant in 99.99% of all practical situations. -- status: open - closed __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Lauri Alanko added the comment: Further comments on the port can be at: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-October/074991.html __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Lauri Alanko added the comment: How do you measure importance? Z/OS is not important to many people in the world, but to those to whom it is important, it is _very_ important, in a very tangible way. It was certainly important enough for someone to port Python to it. :) __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Guido van Rossum added the comment: FYI, I checked the moderation queue for python-dev and didn't find your message. You might want to resend. __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Guido van Rossum added the comment: How do you measure importance? Z/OS is not important to many people in the world, but to those to whom it is important, it is _very_ important, in a very tangible way. It was certainly important enough for someone to port Python to it. :) But is it important enough to cause a lot of work for the maintainers of Python, not just once (reviewing your mega-patch) but also in the future (making sure that the Z/OS support doesn't break)? We have accepted mega-patches for minority OS'es in the past, and our experience has unfortunately been that the contributors of such patches inevitable lose interest and the Python core developers are stuck with maintaining the patch -- or ripping it out, which is just as much work but at least promises that there will be no more work related to this issue in the future. I strongly recommend an alternative: the Z/OS community should maintain the patch set themselves. That way the burden of keeping it working is to those who benefit. It also makes it possible to decide not to upgrade to a newer version of Python because there aren't enough benefits. This is done for example by Nokia for its port to S60. The character set of EBCDIC is a superset of the character set of ASCII. In fact CP1047, the variant used on z/OS, has the same character set as Latin-1. Only the encoding is completely different. And there's the crux -- too much code (not just in the core but also in the library and in 3rd party code) assumes that the ASCII *encoding* is used in 8-bit strings. Breaking this will break tons of stuff. Glancing at your code it seems that you haven't tried the socket module or the higher-level internet modules to contact web servers on the internet... __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Lauri Alanko added the comment: The character set of EBCDIC is a superset of the character set of ASCII. In fact CP1047, the variant used on z/OS, has the same character set as Latin-1. Only the encoding is completely different. As a non-ASCII platform, z/OS is certainly challenging for people used to modern conventions, and that is exactly why a familiar and easy-to-use tool like Python is so valuable there. As for viability, there are some obvious difficulties with Python's handling of source encodings, but as long as you restrict yourself to the ASCII _character set_ in your source code, the vast majority of things seem to work fine with my patch. There are more details in my mail to python-dev, which doesn't seem to have appeared yet. I'm not a subscriber, so it's probably pending moderation somewhere. (I hope The list address accepts e-mail from non-members is still correct information.) __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
[issue1298] Support for z/OS and EBCDIC.
Guido van Rossum added the comment: How important is z/OS? I'm very skeptical of the viability of any OS that uses an encoding that is not a superset of ASCII. -- nosy: +gvanrossum __ Tracker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bugs.python.org/issue1298 __ ___ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
