[I18n-sig] Re: [XML-SIG] Character encodings and expat

[M.-A. Lemburg]

"Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
> 
> > I don't think that reinventing the wheel for the sake of
> > cross-platform compatibility is a bad thing.
> 
> I think it is a bad thing if it deviates from the traditional Python
> to cross-plattform solutions, which is to unify different interfaces
> into a single one (e.g. os, threads, anydbm, DB API, even
> Tkinter). Traditionally, Python provides a fall-back if the platform
> does not provide the functionality. With the codecs, Python provides
> the functionality even though the platform provides it as well, and in
> a better way. That is a bad thing, but I hope it can be corrected in
> future releases.

I don't get it: Python provides a new Unicode type on all platforms
even ones which don't support Unicode at all. An even better:
it is guaranteed to work the same on all platforms.
You'll never get the same level of conformance with platform
specific codecs since there are simply too many issues involved.

Besides, what's the point in argueing against having a fairly
complete set of codecs in the standard distribution ? You can
always revert to using platform specific codecs if you like
(provided you install a proper codec package first).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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