Python & unicode

[Scott David Daniels]

P at draigBrady.com wrote:
> Scott David Daniels wrote:
>> If you allow
>> non-ASCII characters in symbol names, your source code will be
>> unviewable (and uneditable) for people with ASCII-only terminals,
>> never mind how comprehensible it might otherwise be.
> 
> So how does one edit non ascii string literals at the moment?

Generally by using editors that leave bytes alone if they cannot
be understood.  For many applications where I'll work on a program,
I don't need to read the strings, but rather the code that uses
those strings.  I am at a disadvantage if I cannot understand the
derivation of the names, no doubt, but at least I know when two
letters are different, and what tokens are distinct.

> If one edited the whole file in the specified coding
> then one wouldn't have to switch editing modes when
> editing strings which is a real pain.
> 
No question, but ASCII is available as a subset for many encodings.
As you might note, my conception is that I might be helping on a
program with many programmers.  Python spent a lot of effort to
avoid favoring a character set as much as possible, while still
being a medium for sharing code.

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org