On Sun, 10 May 2020 14:13:37 -0400
Richard Damon
An error like character (whatever) is not a quote (or is not a minus sign) seems similar. It is one thing to not recognize a funny character in the language, but to actually parse it well enough to give a message that says in effect, that may look like a quote to you, but I am not going to treat is as one, sounds perverse in the language. If we are going to go to the effort to detect that particular character, it makes more sense to make it actually DO the obvious thing ...
“In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.” There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Your argument is that it's not ambiguous. My argument is that it's not within the Python grammar, and therefore it is ambiguous. Also, that forever precludes using those other quotation characters for something else in the future.
... If not, the the current error seems fine, especially if we could include more details. An 'invalid character' message, that doesn't tell you WHICH character is invalid seems like it is holding back, If it included the bad character, or pointed to it, then the error becomes a lot more clear.
Agreed. -- “Atoms are not things.” – Werner Heisenberg Dan Sommers, http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan