[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131 (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri May 25 13:33:38 CEST 2007

James Y Knight writes:

- The identifier character set won't spontaneously change when
  one upgrades to a new version of Python, even for users of
  non-ASCII identifiers.

FUD. Already won't, unicode explicitly makes that promise. They can
add characters, but not remove them.

Addition is a change, in fact it's the change Ka-Ping dislikes most.

- Having to specify the table of acceptable characters
  demonstrates at least some knowledge of the character set
  one is using.

This is a negative. Why should I have to show knowledge of the
character set I'm using to type the characters?

You don't. Jim's proposal doesn't specify it, but there should be at least two built-in tables, ascii (for the stdlib) and unicode (everything Pythonic in the Identifier classes defined by Unicode). If you don't want to know, just specify -U unicode.

And if there isn't one, just grab the list off Martin's "non-normative" table and there you go.

- It provides the flexibility for different communities to
  to adopt identifier conventions that suit their preferred
  tradeoff of risk vs. expressiveness.

Also a negative. Now, if I want to run the modules from multiple
communities I need to figure out how to merge the tables they have to
separately distribute with their modules.

No, you just use -U unicode.

a) you trust that the author of the file has authored it correctly,
in which case it doesn't matter one bit what character set they used.

Which is why 9 out of 10 American viruses recommend Internet Explorer 5 or below. Because most users do trust authors and other purveyors, including porn sites, etc.

This may be much less true of Python users, but I think most domestic offices of most American corporations would be quite happy to disable Unicode identifier support at compile time.

Restricting the charset at import time is just something to get in
your way with no actual value.

So don't do it; use -U unicode. I bet Jim J and Josiah and Ka-Ping will all explicitly use -U ascii, just to make sure. What's wrong with that, if that's what they want?

Adding baroque command line options for users of other languages to
do some useless verification at import time is not an acceptable
answer. It'd be better to just reject the PEP entirely.

Speaking of exaggeration ....

More information about the Python-3000 mailing list