the meaning of rﾕ.......ï¾

[Henrik Faber]

On 23.07.2012 14:55, Roy Smith wrote:
> In article <500d0632$0$1504$c3e8da3$76491128 at news.astraweb.com>,
>  Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> 
>> Technically, no, it's a SyntaxError, because the Original Poster has used 
>> some sort of "Smart Quotes" characters r’‘ instead of good old fashioned 
>> typewriter-style quotes r'' or r"".
>>
>> If you're going to ask programming questions using an email client that 
>> changes what you type, including smart quotes, special hyphens or other 
>> characters, you're going to have a bad time.
> 
> Some day, we're going to have programming languages that take advantage 
> of the full unicode character set.  Right now, we're working in ASCII 
> and creating silly digrams/trigrams like r'' for raw strings (and triple-quotes for multi-line 
> strings).  Not to mention <=, >=, ==, !=.  And in languages other than 
> python, things like ->, => (arrows for structure membership), and so on.

I disagree. Firstly, Python could already support the different types of
strings even with the ASCII character set. For example, the choice could
have made to treat the apostophe string 'foo' differently from the
double quote string "foo". Then, the backtick could have been used `foo`.

Bash for example uses all three and all three have very different
meanings. Python is different: explicit is better than implicit, and I'd
rather have the "r" the signifies what weird magic is going on instead
of having some weird language rules. It would not be different with some
UTF-8 "rawstring" magic backticks.

Secondly, there's a reason that >=, <= and friends are in use. Every
keyboard has a > key and every keyboard has a = key. I don't know any
that would have >=, <= or != as UTF-8. It is useful to use only a
limited set of characters.

And if I think of PHP's latest fiasco that happened with unicode
characters, it makes me shudder to think you'd want that stuff in
Python. If I remember correctly, it was the Turkish locale that they
stuggled with: Turkey apparently does not have a capital "I", so some
weird PHP magic code broke with the Turkish locale in effect. Having to
keep crap like that in mind is just plain horrible. I'm very happy with
the way Python does it.

Best regards,
Henrik