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Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

Simo Salminen simo_salminen at iki.fi
Fri Feb 7 16:00:48 EST 2003 
* 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/ :
> 
> But what is the price that we pay for this? The millions of Python
> scripts that use 8-bit string literals or comments are broken now in
> order to allow the feature that no one ever used! I think that this is
> an extreme.
> 

I second this.

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 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.

Cheers,
-- 
Simo Salminen
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