[Python-3000] PEP 3138- String representation in Python 3000

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jim Jewett writes:

 > >  Otherwise, they might grumble about the fact that what
 > >  they're seeing isn't English, but it doesn't matter whether it's
 > >  hex-escaped or kanji.
 > 
 > I'm more worried that it might look like English, yet be subtly (and
 > importantly) different.

Let me remind you that I advocated that position, and (1) Martin shot
me down hard, and (2) Guido indicated that it is a point, but he now
seems happy enough not to worry about it.  If you're serious about
that, you need to pick up the ball; I'm not comfortable advocating it,
especially in view of the wide variety of cases where it seems to be
used for something other than diagnosing normally invisible features
of output.

 > I just want it to be very easy to say "on my system, repr is ASCII".

That is in all proposals.

 > I would prefer that ASCII also be the default, so that people who want
 > more characters opt in to receive them,

Well, the people who want more characters include all non-Americans
and some large fraction of Americans.  I don't see how "Better Is
Better" can possibly beat "Worse Is Better" here, given the extent to
which repr is used to produce output meaningful to end-users
(vs. diagnostics for application and/or Python maintainers).