[Python-Dev] PEP 278 - finished? (original) (raw)

Jack Jansen Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com
Fri, 29 Mar 2002 00:16:23 +0100

On maandag, maart 25, 2002, at 10:16 , Guido van Rossum wrote:

I didn't study the patch too carefully, so I'll ask: When this is disabled through the configure flag, is the 'U' mode still recognized? I think it ought to be allowed then (and mean simply text mode) so that Python code opening files in universal mode doesn't have to be prepared for that situation (it can't use the newlines attribute, but that's rarely needed I expect).

Good point. You can now also use "U" mode in non-universal-newline-builds.

Before we go ahead, I'd like MvL and MAL to have a look at the patch to see if there would be interactions with their implementation plans for PEP 262.

I still think that this PEP is a big hack -- but as big hacks go, it seems to have a pretty good payback. I'm hoping that eventually the parser (really the lexer) will be able to open the file in binary mode and recognize all three newline styles directly. That would solve the problems with exec, eval, and compile. Missing: - docs for the new open mode and file attributes (!!!)

Done.

- docs for the --with-universal-newlines flag in README

Done.

- the linecache and pycompile modules should use mode 'U'

Done.

(any others?)

Yes, lots of candidates, but I haven't fixed these. uu comes to mind, xmllib and htmllib and such, probably lots more...