[Python-Dev] Python and the Unicode Character Database (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Mon Nov 29 19:59:57 CET 2010

Alexander Belopolsky wrote:

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 2:22 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

The former ensures that literals in code are always readable; the later allows users to enter numbers in their own number system. How could that be a bad thing?

It's YAGNI, feature bloat. It gives the illusion of supporting something that actually isn't supported very well (namely, parsing local number strings). I claim that there is no meaningful application of this feature.

This is not about parsing local number strings, it's about parsing number strings represented using different scripts - besides en-US is a locale as well, ye know :-)

Speaking of YAGNI, does anyone want to defend

complex('١٢٣٤.٥٦j') 1234.56j ?

Yes. The same arguments apply.

Just because ASCII-proponents may have a hard time reading such literals, doesn't mean that script users have the same trouble.

Especially given that we reject complex('1234.56i'):

http://bugs.python.org/issue10562

We've had that discussion long before we had Unicode in Python. The main reason was that 'i' looked to similar to 1 in a number of fonts which is why it was rejected for Python source code.

However, I don't any reason why we shouldn't accept both i and j for complex(), though, since the input to that constructor doesn't have to originate in Python source code.

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