[I18n-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] Unicode debate

[Just van Rossum]

>[Just]
>> And let's face it, Latin-1 is the ASCII of today.

At 11:48 AM -0400 02-05-2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>Maybe that's where we disagree.  I don't actually have any decent
>facilities to enter Latin-1 characters -- neither my Unix box nor my
>Windows box has a Latin-1 key, and I think the Mac over there in the
>corner has accented characters but it doesn't use Latin-1.

Ok ok, I may have exaggerated... I take it back. So that's not where we
disagree ;-)

>Displaying Latin-1 works about 75% of the time on Unix (several of the
>system fonts only have glyphs for ASCII) and 99% of the time on
>Windows, but when I save a Word file as text and copy it to Unix, it
>has non-Latin-1 characters for squiggly quotes and em-dashes...
>
>So for me, Latin-1 is Euro-centric more than anything.

And for me, ASCII is US-centric more than anything...

>I wonder what position Latin-1 has in countries like Israel or Japan?
>I'm pretty sure they support ASCII, since we can exchange email :-)

Good point.

Still I'd find this hopelessly ugly:

>>> "\377" == u"\377"
0
>>> ord("\377") == ord(u"\377")
1
>>>

You're creating a sense of safety that's false. Many encoding issues remain
silent problems, no matter what you do. It seems you're helping by
restricting yourself to 7 bit ascii, but you're just pushing the problem
into more obscure corners.

Just