[Python-Dev] ascii.py?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>:
> "Eric S. Raymond" wrote:
> > 
> > There has been a vast and echoing silence about the ascii.py module I
> > posted here at Fred Drake's request.  Is it really such a  bad idea?
> 
> Without looking closely, or even being particularly knowledgable (how's
> that for a disclaimer!) my instinctive reaction was: "does the ASCII
> subset of Unicode need its own module just before we add Unicode to the
> language?"
> 
> It may be that there are some semantics of ASCII that are not captured
> in the Unicode spec. and thus are not generalizable.

ascii.ctrl is one such.

>                                                       I'm pretty
> confident that these ones ARE generalizable:
> 
> isalnum
> isalpha
> isascii
> islower
> isupper
> isspace
> isxdigit
> 
> How do Unicode users get this information from the famous Unicode
> database and why not merge the Unicode and ASCII versions in 1.6?

Answer: ascii.py is not designed for text processing.  I wrote it to package
some functions useful for classifying *ASCII* data, especially in the
context of roguelike programs that interpret keystrokes coming in through
a curses interface.

(Where this all touches ground is CML2, my replacement configuration 
system for the Linux kernel.)
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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