[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Terry Reedy writes:

 > > In python 2 there was no such a strong imposition [of Unicode
 > > awareness on users].
 > 
 > Nor is there in 3.x.

Sorry, Terry, but you're basically wrong here.  True, if one sticks to
pure ASCII, there's no difference to notice, but that's just not
possible for people who live outside of the U.S., or who share text
with people outside of the U.S.  They need currency symbols, they have
friends whose names have little dots on them.  Every single one of
those is a backtrace waiting to happen.  A backtrace on

    f = open('text-file.txt')
    for line in f: pass

is an imposition.  That doesn't happen in 2.x (for the wrong reasons,
but it's very convenient 95% of the time).

This is what Victor's "locale" codec is all about.  I think that's the
wrong spelling for the feature, but there does need to be a way to
express "don't bother me about Unicode" in most scripts for most
people.  We don't have a decent boilerplate for that yet.