[Python-Dev] PEP 263 considered faulty (for some Japanese) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Tue, 12 Mar 2002 11:14:54 -0500

My position on this is not to introduce more defaults -- explicit is better than implicit and in this particular case (encodings) it'll result in a net win.

I'd like to believe you. But the fact that apparently there are Japanese users who are willing to give up part of the language and library just so they can have an certain default, suggests that the need for defaults is a strong force. Maybe we would've been better off leaving sys.setdefaultencoding() enabled -- then those people might have put sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-16") at the top of their program rather than hacking site.py... :-(

> In the light of the post by Atsuo Ishimoto and the responses from both > Marc-Andre Lemburg and Martin von Loewis, however, I'm not sure > whether Suziki Hisao's response represents the Japanese community, and > it's possible that nothing needs to be done.

Well, users using non-ASCII coding in their source files should start to be explicit about the encoding (in phase 1 they'll get a warning printed which makes them aware of the problem), but other than that, I don't see a need for changes to the strategy.

Suzuki won't get the warning, because his source files are pure ASCII -- but his Unicode string literals will be interpreted as utf-16, which will break his programs. The question is, do we care about him and others like him, or do we decide that their habits are bad for them and they have to change them?

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