[Python-Dev] international python (original) (raw)

Neil Hodgson nyamatongwe at gmail.com
Sat Sep 10 05:17:55 CEST 2005

Antoine Pitrou:

I don't have a Windows machine at hand right now to test it, but, even if this solution works, it breaks the principle of least astonishment:

Astonishment is subjective and so a poor tool to measure by. At one stage Ruby tried to follow the more common formulation "principle of least surprise" (POLS) but this produced arguments of the following form:

I am surprised by X. Therefore, X contradicts POLS. Therefore, X must be fixed.

POLS was then abandoned.

os.path.abspath() should do the Right Thing regardless of what the current locale is.

This was discussed recently and the consensus position was for functions that can not return a value in the default encoding to instead return a unicode value. Correct implementation of this would require not only changing the behaviour of functions returning strings but also those receiving strings (which should treat byte strings as being in the default encoding). This would require a large amount of work, and is unlikely to be performed in the near future.

Neil

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