[Python-3000] Recursive str (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Apr 15 20:21:35 CEST 2008

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Guido van Rossum writes: > In Py3k we may be able to do something else though -- instead of > insisting on ASCII we could allow a much larger set of characters to > be unescaped.

Yes. The implications of the PEP 3131 discussions about Unicode identifiers should be considered carefully. Eg, consider the potential of confusing ASCII 'A' with Cyrillic 'A'. I'm very unhappy with the idea of having Cyrillic 'A' \u-escaped when calling repr() on objects in a Russian's program, but I don't like the alternative of having "print repr(bogus)" being no more informative than "print bogus" in this situation any better.

So it sounds like we're doomed if we do, and damned if we don't. Or do I misunderstand you? Do you have a practical suggestion?

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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