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

Steve Howell showell30 at yahoo.com
Fri May 25 04:01:07 CEST 2007

--- Guillaume Proux <gproux+py3000 at gmail.com> wrote:

The additional burden that ascii loving people would like to impose on the rest of the world through the usage of command line switches is unwanted IMHO.

I think now that PEP 3131 has been accepted, you can coarsely frame the remaining conflict as between ascii lovers and non-ascii lovers, and the dispute is over who has to muck with their command line/environment to get Python to reflect their bias.

Obviously, in any conflict, there are solutions that mostly satisfy both parties.

If Python 3.0 leaned too much toward appeasing non-ascii lovers, you could still devise plenty of workarounds that made ascii lovers not suffer too immensely. Ascii lovers could revisit their security philosophies, by paying more scrunity to who actually supplies patches, etc. Ascii lovers could upgrade their editors, run more unit tests, etc. Ascii lovers could build tools from tokenize.py, etc., that facilitated the porting of non-English or non-Latin code to English/lation.

If Python 3.0 leaned too much toward appeasing ascii lovers, you could still devise plenty of workarounds that made non-ascii lovers not suffer too immensely. You could make error messages more helpful, you could have regional distros supply useful aliases, you could have users groups educated newbies, etc.

If Python 3.0 judged the middle ground wrong, you could adjust in Python 3.1.

Of course, there's a lot of gray area when you put people on the spectrum. As an example, take me--I'm mostly an ascii lover, but I'm sympathetic to non-ascii concerns. My first language is English, but I speak a bit of French, have written applications for Spanish users, and have collaborated with people who internationalized my software for languages that I'm almost completely unfamiliar with (Dutch, Catalan, etc.)

Regarding the "command line," this ascii mostly-lover doesn't necessarily want to impose command line restrictions on anybody. I'd much rather impose "environment" restrictions on ALL Python users.

Here's my reasoning:

  1. It's fair. Even as an ascii lover and beneficiary, I have to deal with environment variables nearly as much as non-ascii lovers (PYTHONPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ORA_HOME, etc.)

  2. It's really all about the environment. There's a difference between running Python in an enterprisy environment, an OLPC environment, a Japanese-person-trying-to-ween-himself-off-Ruby environment, etc.

  3. It's often free. I suspect most non-ASCII users already have environment settings that suggest their willingness to tolerate lack of ASCII purity. Coudn't Python sniff those out?

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