[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Guido van Rossum writes:
 > On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:23 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

 > > One question:
 > >
 > > There are currently number of patch waiting on the tracker for
 > > additional Unicode feature support and it's also likely that we'll
 > > want to upgrade to a more recent Unicode version within the
 > > next few years.
 > >
 > > How would such indirect changes be seen under the moratorium ?
 > 
 > That would fall under the Case-by-Case Exemptions section. "Within the
 > next few years" sounds like it might well wait until the moratorium is
 > ended though. :-)

(1) Unicode "feature support" (eg, implementing access to various
    databases, implementation of new algorithms) strikes me as worth a
    hearing but very dubious under case-by-case (the case I have in
    mind is when necessary to support (2) or (3)).

(2) Adjusting existing implementations of Unicode features (eg,
    universal newline, which currently does not conform to the
    relevant TR AFAIK, thus dubious IMO) to conform to (new versions
    of) Unicode seems worthy of consideration on a cost/benefit basis.
    I would expect that in most cases the costs that lead to a
    moratorium would outweigh prospective benefits, though.  I don't
    know of an example where I'd support an exception to the
    moratorium for this, though.  It's hard to imagine that things
    like the algorithm for UTF-16 are going to change, and support for
    things like bidi are currently outside of the scope of the
    moratorium as I understand it -- they'd be stdlib facilities.

(3) Upgrading the character repertoire and property databases (eg,
    case and composition) seems like a shoo-in to me.  That's why the
    databases are versioned.  Of course there are costs to upgrading
    (backward compatibility in some corner cases, eg) that might
    outweigh the benefits at any given time, but I don't think this
    should fall under the moratorium if someone finds a benefit to
    upgrading the databases within the moratorium period.