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Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

Roman Suzi rnd at onego.ru
Sat Feb 8 02:03:49 EST 2003 
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Jp Calderone wrote:

>On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 09:00:48PM +0000, Simo Salminen wrote:
>> * Kirill Simonov [Fri, 7 Feb 2003 18:39:56 +0200]
>> > * M.-A. Lemburg <mal at lemburg.com>:
>> >> No, but they'll need to pay some lucky Python programmer to get rid off
>> >> the warning :-) Seriously, the warning and the trouble are intended as
>> >> I already mentioned in the bug report Kirill filed on SF:
>> >> http://www.python.org/sf/681960/ :
>
>  While it's true the programs are now "broken" (They're not really, they
>won't be broken until this becomes a SyntaxError, and only then if they're
>run on the new version of the interpreter - They will always work on
>previous versions, forever), they were "broken" before - Python source files
>were previously to contain *only* ASCII text.

Wow! I did not know this. If I did, I'd choosed some other programming
language.

>> This change only makes python hostile to regular programmer, who does not
>> care about encodings, and only wants to use simple 8-bit characters in
>> comments.
>> 
>> People (well, atleast me) won't start to specify encoding at the start of
>> the file, because it does not buy anything. They will just stop using
>> high-bit ascii characters in comments, thus decreasing the level of
>> documentation.
>
>  If you need to regularly use an encoding other than ASCII, and you cannot
>configure your editor to put the appropriate text at the top of newly
>created .py files, I humbly suggest that you need to find a new editor.

I wonder if this thread is really about letting vapour out
in US vs World debate.

Forget ASCII. I will use koi7 ;-)

>> > If you need a pythonic quote, it is here
>> >     "Practicality beats purity"
>> 
>> Exactly. This change makes writing high-bit ASCII comments _very_
>> unpractical, and breaks old code for no good reason.
>
>  There is no such thing as high-bit ASCII.  If you don't understand the
>issue, why do you think you can comment relevantly upon it?

The term ASCII is sometimes (not very correctly, I admit) used
to describe 128-255 codes.

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
rnd at onego.ru =\= My AI powered by Linux RedHat 7.3
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