Andy Robinson wrote:

--- "M.-A. Lemburg" wrote:

...

So I can drop JIS ? [I won't be able to drop the escaped unicode codec because this is needed for u"" and ur"".]

Drop Japanese from the core language.

Done ... that one was easy ;-)

JIS0208 is a big character set with three popular encodings (Shift-JIS, EUC-JP and JIS), and a host of slight variations; it has 6879 characters, and there are a range of options a user might need to set for it to be useful. So let's assume for now this a separate package. There's a good chance I'll do it but it is not a small job. If you start statically linking in tables of 7000 characters for one Asian language, you'll have to do the lot.

As for the single-byte Latin ones, a prototype Python module could be whipped up in a couple of evenings, and a tiny C function which does single-byte to double-byte mappings and vice versa could make it fast. We can have an extensible, data driven solution in no time without having to build it into the core.

Perhaps these helper function could be intergrated into the core to avoid compilation when adding a new codec.

The way I see it, to claim that python has i18n, a serious effort is needed to ensure every major encoding in the world is available to Python users. But that's separate to the core languages. Your spec should only cover what is going to be hard-coded into Python.

Right.

I'd like to see one paragraph in your spec stating that our architecture seperates the encodings themselves from the core language changes, and that getting them sorted is a logically separate (but important) project. Ideally, we could put together a separate proposal for the encoding library itself and run it by some world class experts in that field, but after yours is done.

I've added: All other encoding such as the CJK ones to support Asian scripts should be implemented in seperate packages which do not get included in the core Python distribution and are not a part of this proposal. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Y2000: 45 days left Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/