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

Paul Svensson paul@svensson.org
Sun, 17 Mar 2002 21:27:39 -0500 (EST)

On 18 Mar 2002, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Emacs naming compatibility is of ambiguous value in the current form of the PEP, since the cookie only applies to Unicode string literals. The Emacs coding cookie applies to the whole file. So this means that to implement a Python mode that allows (eg) a hexl mode on ordinary string literals but regular text mode on Unicode string literals, Emacs must ignore Python coding cookies!

Since the proposal explicitly allows only encodings that are strict supersets of ASCII, the whole file is using (a subset of) the encoding specified by the cookie. So, if Emacs recognizes the cookie, it will allow you to edit both code and unicode strings, as text. If you need to put non-ASCII data in regular strings, not using the specified encoding, then write them as \xNN-escapes.

/Paul