Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Saturday 08 February 2003 17:49, Roman Suzi wrote:
> <snipped list of voters pro and contra>
>
> This "statistics" shows that those who use some extension of ASCII
> are concerned.
>
> However, I'd liked to hear people from Asia. What are you thinking
> about PEP-0263? Is it good, neutral or bad for you? Please, voice
> your opinion as it not too late to change Python behaviour to better
> suit our needs.

One does things to solve a problem. I'm still wondering what problem is so big 
as to deserve breaking up code written by someone else. I can understand that 
better supporting for encodings is important, because I've been fighting 
Unicode strings and COM automation for some time now, and I can tell what a 
nightmare it can be when programs don't agree over it. However, I don't see 
this proposal as a step in the right direction, specially for beginners.

As a non-ascii writer (if that thing exists), I would argue for a more careful 
approach here, which involved the actual users of alternative (non-UTF8, 
non-ascii) encodings, and lots of testing. This is going to be a big problem 
if done without a *lot* of real world feedback.


Carlos RIbeiro
cribeiro at mail.inet.com.br