[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131 (original) (raw)

Steve Howell showell30 at yahoo.com
Fri May 25 02:15:38 CEST 2007

--- "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

-2. Any solution found must also accommodate users which are unaware of the security issue, and just want to use their native language for identifiers. So requiring them to change their environment or pass additional command line parameters is unacceptable.

Let me say first that I'm 100% behind PEP 3131, and that I agree with you with that many of the objections to the PEP are kind of FUDish.

Still, I have a hard time accepting your premise that even ordinary, non-security-aware programmers are so deterred by changing their environment.

In almost every programming situation I've been in, I've had to deal with environmental issues, even though my character set of choice has never been the primary issue.

When I programmed in C, I had to learn my way around makefiles, figure out LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.

When I programmed in Perl, I had to change my shebangs when I moved from one Unix box to another, due to the way sys admins installed Perl.

When I programmed in Java, I had to learn how .jar files worked.

Now that I program in Python, I still have to fuss with PYTHONPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (we use C extensions) when I go between version 20 (installed in the field), version 21 (installed in the text box), and shDevBranch (code I'm working on now).

Also in Python, the concept of a wrapper shell script is just part of a programmer's life. I have a program that needs to run as user "operator," and I can't sudo-enable Python itself (big security hole), so I write a one-line sudo script that just calls safe.py, and I sudo enable it.

Please do consider the needs of the people who want to actively use the feature as well. Otherwise, you have no chance of understanding what will make everyone happy.

I think there are things that can be done here, even if we make Python's default mode to be ascii-pure. Regional distros can set the environment appropriately. Python error messages about non-ascii characters can suggest how to enable the -U flag. The Tokyo Python User's Group can educate programmers, etc.

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