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

Jim Jewett jimjjewett at gmail.com
Thu May 24 17:48:58 CEST 2007

On 5/24/07, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

I have actually worked in an environment where you can't visually distinguish different characters. Security aside, it's a PITA, and you do want tools to deal with it. ... simply audit the editor buffer for characters outside of the user's acceptable set, and be 99% happy. Once you've got tools, it's not a big deal. Can you find somebody with experience to say otherwise?

...

And that's a big "if". Most of your users will not see code in a language the current version of your editor can't deal with in their working lives, ...

The problem (with larger charsets) isn't that you regularly face indistinguishable characters. It is that you face them rarely enough that you don't remember to run that audit, so the actual bug is very difficult to track down.

Ignoring security issues, that could probably be handled by having to flip a switch before importing those modules. So long as the default allows only ASCII, the act of flipping that switch is my reminder to check.

While an on/off toggle would generally be sufficient for my needs, I would feel more comfortable with a per-script allowance, so that I could say "OK, go ahead and allow Kanji, but still warn me if there is a stray Cyrillic character."

-jJ

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