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

Ka-Ping Yee python at zesty.ca
Thu May 24 23:44:02 CEST 2007

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

I'll tell you why Ka-Ping's argument is a strawman. First, one only needs to be able to distinguish those characters that one can read. It's nice to be able to admire the rest, of course, but you don't need to see them as a speaker of that language would. You just use a font you like for the characters you can read, and the rest can be any old dog.

The problem is that you don't know when you'll need to distinguish those characters.

Situations where things are not obviously incorrect, but only subtly incorrect, are a common source of practical problems. Choosing the full set of Unicode identifier characters as the identifier character set for everyone puts nearly all Python users in that situation.

That's what the issue is here: defining correct practice to be something sufficiently difficult that almost everyone's regular practices are subtly wrong in ways they don't fully understand. That's a recipe for bugs, vulnerabilities, confusion, etc.

The loadable table that you proposed, and Jim proposed, really sounds like the best way to go here. Those that are ready and able to handle the added complexity can voluntarily adopt it, and those who don't (or don't even know about it) won't have to deal with it.

-- ?!ng

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