New PEP: The directive statement

[Tim Peters]

[Martin von Loewis]
> ...
> That concerns me about PEP 236: The absolute certainty in which people
> predict the future. My experience is that the future is unpredictable
> when it comes to software releases. It may turn out that there are
> unforeseen problems with nested scopes, or that foreseen problems turn
> out to be more serious than expected.

The entire point of the PEP is to give incompatible language changes a trial
run of at least one full release cycle before saying "that's it".  In what
respect does that come off as absolute certainty to you?  And in what respect
does your PEP differ in relation to this point?  If you have a better idea,
change your PEP to spell it out.

> ...
> Tim claims that I invented the statement to declare file encodings,
> e.g.
>
> directive encoding "koi8-r"

Gimme a break:  At least that differs from the

    directive source_encoding "latin-1"

you put in your patch comment <wink>:

    http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&
        aid=404997&group_id=5470&atid=305470

That would be a fine use for "directive"!  I don't grasp what you're after in
repeating this "Tim claims" business:  getting a way to specify file
encodings is an obvious agenda of yours, and there's nothing wrong with it.