[Python-Dev] PEP 383 (again)

[Thomas Breuel]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 07:45, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

> Your claim was
> that PEP 383 may have unfortunate effects on Windows,


No, I simply think that PEP 383 is not sufficiently specified to be able to
tell.


> and I'm telling
> you that it won't, because the behavior of Python on Windows won't
> change at all.


A justification for your proposal is that there are differences between
Python on UNIX and Windows that you would like to reduce.  But depending on
where you introduce utf-8b coding on UNIX, you may also have to introduce it
on Windows in order to keep the platforms consistent.

So whatever the problem - it's there already, and the
> PEP is not going to change it.


OK, so you are saying that under PEP 383, utf-8b wouldn't be used anywhere
on Windows by default.  That's not clear from your proposal.

It's also not clear from your proposal where utf-8b will get used on UNIX
systems.  Some of the places that have been suggested are: open, os.listdir,
sys.argv, os.getenv. There are other potential ones, like print, write, and
os.system.  And what about text file and string conversions: will utf-8b
become the default, or optional, or unavailable?

Each of those choices potentially has significant implications.  I'm just
asking what those choices are so that one can then talk about the
implications and see whether this proposal is a good one or whether other
alternatives are better.

Tom
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