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

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
14 Mar 2002 18:28:04 +0100

SUZUKI Hisao <suzuki611@oki.com> writes:

And almost every operating system in Japan is on the way to adopt Unicode to save us from the chaos. I am afraid the mileage of the PEP will be fairly short and just results in loading a lot of burden onto the language,

That is a mis-perception. The PEP does not add a lot of burden onto the language; the stage-1 implementation is fairly trivial. The biggest change in the interpreter will be to have the parser operate on Unicode all the time; that change will be necessary stage 2, whether UTF-8 will be the default encoding or not.

Also, the warning framework added will help people migrating - whether towards UTF-8 or custom locally-declared encodings is their choice.

I know it is not the best practice either. However, you cannot safely write ShiftJIS into Python source file anyway, unless you hack up the interpreter parser itself for now.

In stage 2 of the PEP, this will be possible (assuming Python has access to a Shift_JIS codec).

Regards, Martin