PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

On May 16, 6:38 pm, r... at yahoo.com wrote:
> On May 16, 11:41 am, "sjdevn... at yahoo.com" <sjdevn... at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Christophe wrote:
> ....snip...
> > > Who displays stack frames? Your code. Whose code includes unicode
> > > identifiers? Your code. Whose fault is it to create a stack trace
> > > display procedure that cannot handle unicode? You.
>
> > Thanks but no--I work with a _lot_ of code I didn't write, and looking
> > through stack traces from 3rd party packages is not uncommon.
>
> Are you worried that some 3rd-party package you have
> included in your software will have some non-ascii identifiers
> buried in it somewhere?  Surely that is easy to check for?
> Far easier that checking that it doesn't have some trojan
> code it it, it seems to me.

What do you mean, "check for"?  If, say, numeric starts using math
characters (as has been suggested), I'm not exactly going to stop
using numeric.  It'll still be a lot better than nothing, just
slightly less better than it used to be.

> > And I'm often not creating a stack trace procedure, I'm using the
> > built-in python procedure.
>
> > And I'm often dealing with mailing lists, Usenet, etc where I don't
> > know ahead of time what the other end's display capabilities are, how
> > to fix them if they don't display what I'm trying to send, whether
> > intervening systems will mangle things, etc.
>
> I think we all are in this position.  I always send plain
> text mail to mailing lists, people I don't know etc.  But
> that doesn't mean that email software should be contrainted
> to only 7-bit plain text, no attachements!  I frequently use
> such capabilities when they are appropriate.

Sure.  But when you're talking about maintaining code, there's a very
high value to having all the existing tools work with it whether
they're wide-character aware or not.

> If your response is, "yes, but look at the problems html
> email, virus infected, attachements etc cause", the situation
> is not the same.  You have little control over what kind of
> email people send you but you do have control over what
> code, libraries, patches, you choose to use in your
> software.
>
> If you want to use ascii-only, do it!  Nobody is making
> you deal with non-ascii code if you don't want to.

Yes.  But it's not like this makes things so horribly awful that it's
worth my time to reimplement large external libraries.  I remain at -0
on the proposal; it'll cause some headaches for the majority of
current Python programmers, but it may have some benefits to a
sizeable minority and may help bring in new coders.  And it's not
going to cause flaming catastrophic death or anything.