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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen@xemacs.org
14 Mar 2002 10:45:52 +0900

"Chris" == Chris Hagner <chagner@yahoo.com> writes:

Chris> This may be naive, but would a package-level encoding
Chris> specifier be a useful middle ground?

No. Or rather, packagers would find it convenient, and then some poor bloke with a spanking new Internet connection in .cn would import a submodule from .ru covered only by a package-level declaration.

Chris>   This would adhere to the "purity" of associating the
Chris> encoding with the source files, but still provide a less
Chris> laborious solution

Eliminating traffic signals would eliminate excess vertical eye motion while driving, too.

Adding coding cookies to files is going to be a small one-time expense that saves a huge amount of grief.

For example, I'm planning to add cookie consistency checking to XEmacs, and it would be easy to add "do you want a cookie?" facilities to python-mode. Doing a whole mixed tree would be a dozen lines in Emacs Lisp (Python doesn't have the auto-detection facilities yet AFAIK), and simply adding the cookie to every .py is obviously trivial in a mono-coding project. And no work is involved if you're pure ASCII.

Chris> Along this line of thought, I would assume the big question
Chris> would be, "Is it safe/fair/wise to assume a package's
Chris> source files are homogenous (encoding-wise)?".

Not even internal to a development group, for many (eg, for Japanese, or for Croatian Gastarbeiter in Germany) values of "development group".

-- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.