[Python-Dev] Please review PEP 278 (original) (raw)

[Python-Dev] Please review PEP 278 - Universal newline support

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Wed, 06 Mar 2002 17:26:15 -0500

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[Jack]

PEP 278 has been quietly sitting there with nothing much happening, after some initial discussion with two or three people.

First question: would people please review it, and preferrably also test it (esp. windows and linux are platforms on which I would like to see it tested).

I skimmed it a few days ago, but didn't find the time to write a response. I think there were a lot of questions before you wrote the PEP, that the PEP doesn't answer yet. I don't even think that it answers all the questions asked in the SF patch tracker.

Second question: what happens next? How is the PEP accepted?

I expect that this PEP needs to be revised a number of times before it's ready to be accepted.

Some questions to get you started:

• What on earth is a source() call?

• Why not support setting the delimiter for output files too?

• The 't' mode conflicts with the use of this mode on Windows to be an explicit way to invoke the default text translation mode.

• Why can't 't' be used together with '+'? Text mode on Windows supports '+' AFAIK.

• How does this interact with xreadlines? With "for line in file" ?

• Why settle for a compile-time option that's off by default? That's asking for problems; people who turn it on will write code that uses the 't' mode and then find that it's not portable.

• You say that 't' mode is used by import. What about parsing source code from a string? What about Unicode strings?

• I think I need more clarification of your remark about locks. If the implementation can be abused to create core dumps, I'm not for it.

Note that I'm playing devil's advocate here -- I know there are reasonable answers to many of these questions. But the PEP doesn't give them.

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

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