[Python-Dev] PEP 460 reboot (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Jan 15 07:58:23 CET 2014

Right, that's the danger I was worried about, but the problem is that there's at least some minimum level of ASCII compatibility that needs to be assumed in order to define an interpolation format at all (this is the point I originally missed).

Only if you insist that bytes formats be admitted. But that's an implementation detail, really. (I'm not going to push that point, since it's the obvious way to request a bytes result, and insist on the various restrictions and semantic differences proposed for bytes interpolation -- anything else would be silly.)

More seriously, it's irrelevant post-interpolation, because by definition bytes interpolation interpolates bytes, not "ASCII compatible". So what you're saying is iterated interpolation is crazy:

width1, width2 = compute_column_widths(table_rows)
fmt = b"%%%ds %%%ds\n" % (width1, width2)
for row in table_rows:
    print(fmt % row)        # might be useful in debugging ;-)
                            # writing to a file is plausible IMO

Tell me again why we have a '%%' format code? :-)

(which must make life interesting if you try to use an ASCII incompatible coding cookie for your source code - I'm actually not sure what the full implications of that are for bytes literals in Python 3).

Currently None:

me 15:46$ python3.3 test.py File "test.py", line 2 SyntaxError: bytes can only contain ASCII literal characters.

:-)

It's certainly a decision that has its downsides, with the potential impact on users of ASCII incompatible encodings (mostly in Asia)

Which is most of the world at this point. You ISO-8859-speakers are gonna wither away! :-) Nor do I think there's anybody crazy enough to make a Tiananmen Square-style stand against GB18030. In 2025 this could be Python's most sensitive Achilles' heel. Hm. Maybe I should put a fractional coefficient on that .

being the main one, but I think the increased convenience in working with ASCII compatible binary protocols and file formats is worth the cost.

But there aren't any ASCII-compatible binary protocols in the sense that Shift JIS is not ASCII compatible. After interpolation, you end up with something that's not ASCII compatible.

At the very least, the "iterated interpolation is a bad idea" misfeature needs to be documented.

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