On Tuesday, July 19, 2016 at 10:20:29 AM UTC+5:30, Nick Coghlan wrote:

On 18 July 2016 at 13:41, Rustom Mody <rusto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do consider:
>
>>>> Α = 1
>>>> A = 2
>>>> Α + 1 == A
> True
>>>>
>
> Can (IMHO) go all the way to
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

Yes, we know - that dramatic increase in the attack surface is why
PyPI is still ASCII only, even though full Unicode support is
theoretically possible.

It's not a major concern once an attacker already has you running
arbitrary code on your system though, as the main problem there is
that they're *running arbitrary code on your system*. , That means the
usability gains easily outweigh the increased obfuscation potential,
as worrying about confusable attacks at that point is like worrying
about a dripping tap upstairs when the Brisbane River is already
flowing through the ground floor of your house :)

Cheers,

There was this question on the python list a few days ago:
Subject: SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character

Chris Angelico pointed out the offending line:
wf = wave.open(“test.wav”, “rb”)
(should be wf = wave.open("test.wav", "rb") instead)

Since he also said:
> The solution may be as simple as running "python3 script.py" rather than "python script.py".

I pointed out that the python2 error was more helpful (to my eyes) than python3s


Python3

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/ariston/foo.py", line 31
    wf = wave.open(“test.wav”, “rb”)
                       ^
SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier

Python2


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "foo.py", line 31
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file foo.py on line 31, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

IOW
1. The lexer is internally (evidently from the error message) so ASCII-oriented that any “unicode-junk” just defaults out to identifiers (presumably comments are dealt with earlier) and then if that lexing action fails it mistakenly pinpoints a wrong *identifier* rather than just an impermissible character like python 2
combine that with
2. matrix mult (@) Ok to emulate perl but not to go outside ASCII

makes it seem  (to me) python's unicode support is somewhat wrongheaded.