On Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:20:15 +1000 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On 14/06/13 19:22, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:06:55 +1000 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On 14/06/13 18:49, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
"Keeping the HTML source ASCII-only" is just silly IMO,
Surely no sillier than "keep the Python std lib source ASCII-only".
Or than drawing stupid analogies. Do you understand the difference between source code and hypertext documents?
Of course I do. I don't believe that the differences are as important as the similarities. Both are text. Both are expected to be read by human beings, at least sometimes.
HTML is expected to be viewed through a browser. Reading raw HTML is the exception, not the norm. Moreover, CPython's source code is supposed to be written and commented in English, meaning there's no opportunity for non-ASCII characters. However, note that *arbitrary* Python code can happily contain non-ASCII characters (including in identifiers).
Both may be edited in an editor, or otherwise passed through some tool, that does not handle non-ASCII text correctly, causing corruption.
Well, I'm personally ok with letting users of such incompetent tools deal with it on their own. Python needn't fix all problems in the computing world.
Is this the point where someone now argues that it's too trivial to bother putting in the standard library?
I'm not arguing against putting it in the standard library, I'm arguing against making it a built-in error handler. (and IMO it's not too trivial)
And I haven't seen you propose a patch (when was your last patch, by the way?).
Does it matter?
In an open source project which is ultimately driven by code contributions, yes, it does matter quite a bit. Also, in contrast with *other* open source projects, users of Python don't have the excuse of being non-programmers to block them from contributing.
Do you think that *only* those who have contributed patches are capable of recognising a good, useful piece of functionality when they see it?
No, but certainly they are better able to judge whichever is "trivial" or not; and how desirable it is *for them* to accept the additional maintenance burden (since you aren't the one doing any maintenance, again). Regards Antoine.