[Python-3000] PEP 3131 accepted (original) (raw)

Jim Jewett jimjjewett at gmail.com
Wed May 23 18:39:43 CEST 2007

On 5/23/07, Ka-Ping Yee <python at zesty.ca> wrote:

First: the "Common Objections" section of the PEP is too thin. I'd like the following arguments to be mentioned there for the record:

4. Python programs that reuse other Python modules may come to contain a mix of character sets such that no one can fully read them or properly display them.

4.a

Certain cut-and-paste errors (such as cutting from a word document that uses "smart quotes") will change from syntax errors to silently creating new identifiers.

5. Unicode is young and unfinished. As far as I know there are no truly complete Unicode fonts and there may not be for some time. Tool support is weak. The whole computer industry has 40 years of experience working with ASCII for everything, including programming languages; our experience with Unicode security issues and Unicode in programming languages is fairly immature.

5.a Use of unicode for identifiers is not yet a resolved issue. The unicode consortium mostly recommends XID rather than the older ID; both sets already have "stability characters" and canonicalization concerns. It isn't quite clear which marks/letters/scripts to leave out. (The recommendations conflict; other than ASCII-only, I'm not sure I've found one yet that leaves out "letters" indistiguishable (even in the reference font) from already-meaningful syntax characters.)

We can make up our own answers, but if we do that... maybe we shouldn't rush.

-jJ

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