Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Martin v. Loewis]

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

>     Martin> Actually, PEP 263 gives a much wider choice; consider this
>     Martin> aspect solved.
> 
> Some of us consider the wider choice to be a severe defect of PEP 263.

People have all kinds of opinions on this aspect of the PEP.

> That doesn't mean we think that Python should prohibit writing
> programs in arbitrary user-specified encodings.  Only that the
> facility for transforming a non-Unicode program into Unicode should be
> provided as a standard library facility, rather than part of the
> language.

I believe that you are still the only one who voices this specific
position. More often, you find the position that Python source code
should be restricted to UTF-8, period. The counter-position to that
is: what about existing code, and what about people who don't have
UTF-8 editors?

Apart from you, nobody else agrees with the approach "let's make it
part of the library instead of part of the language". To most users,
the difference appears not to matter (including myself, except that I
think making it part of the language simplifies maintenance of the
feature).

I don't consider it evil to provide users with options: If UTF-8 is
technically superior (which I agree it is), it will become the default
text encoding of the future, anywith, with or without this PEP. Notice
that the PEP slightly favours UTF-8 over other encodings, due to
support of the UTF-8 signature.

Regards,
Martin