Comment on PEP 263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings

[Martin v. Loewis]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> And these signatures certainly don't belong in internal objects, like
> Python strings.  

In Python, there are byte strings, and character (unicode)
strings. What data type would you use to represent the BOM if not the
byte string type?

I agree that the BOM does not belong into a Unicode object.

> They're purely for interapplication communication (as you point out
> elsewhere, Python surely knows implicitly whether it's BE or LE).

Sure, but Python should allow to implement such interapplication
communication, so application programmers need a way to emit them.
"Batteries included" means that common cases of interapplication
communication ought to be supported by the library.

> XEmacs will support UTF-8 signatures, but (by default) it will
> complain as loudly as I can make it do without actually interrupting
> execution of a function.

That's fine; most people seem to agree that the signatures are not
very Unixish. I disagree, but I won't try to convince others of that
position :-)

Regards,
Martin