[Python-3000] gettext

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Apr 30, 2008, at 2:41 PM, Torsten Bronger wrote:

> Indeed.  From today's perspective, I see no use case for getting
> human text snippets in byte strings encoded with the same encoding
> that just happened to be used in the .mo file, or with the
> "preferred system encoding".

Agreed.

> So it is only about the question how much hassle a
> renaming/deprecation generates for existing code.

Maybe we shouldn't be so worried about deprecation.  Py3 is a clean  
break, right?

>> That might argue for renaming ugettext() to gettext() and adding
>> something like a egettext() or bgettext() method.
>
> Okay.  But I think its not much advantage to have the "encoded"
> functions under new names, given that instead of renaming, you can
> also easily use ugettext to mimic their behaviour.

Works for me.

>> OTOH, the current names are inspired from GNU gettext so it seems
>> to me there's not much value in renaming our methods, except to
>> increase confusion and break backward compatibility <wink>.
>
> Well, this is hard to evaluate.  However, I think that if there is
> no danger of getting silent errors, then the module should switch to
> unicode, possibly even unicode-only.  After all, the results of
> gettext are likely to be passed to higher-level functions that use
> (or will switch to) unicode, too.
>
> As for "gettext" returning a unicode string: If clearly documented,
> I see not too much harm in using a different type scheme than C
> gettext; this should be acceptable in a reimplementation in another
> language.

Torsten, I agree.  Let's just rename ugettext() to gettext() and have  
it return unicodes.  That's the cleanest API we can do for Python.

- -Barry

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