Python shell wont open idle or an exisiting py file

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/31/2014 10:36 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 1:54 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
>> I think that some years ago I heard about a variation on UTF-8
>> (Microsoft?) where codepoint U+0000 is encoded as 0xC0 0x80 so that the
>> null byte can be used as the string terminator.
>>
>> I had a look on Wikipedia found this:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string
>
> Yeah, it's a common abuse of UTF-8. It's a violation of spec, but an
> understandable one. However, I don't understand why the first part -
> why should \0 become U+0000 but (presumably) the \a later on
> (...cs\accel...) doesn't become U+0007, etc?

Because only  \0 has a special meaning in a C string, and Tk is written 
in C and uses C strings.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy