[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Fri, 25 May 2007, [UTF-8] "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
> Ka-Ping Yee schrieb:
> > On Fri, 25 May 2007, [ISO-8859-1] "Martin v. L�wis" wrote:
> > People who want to use the feature can turn it on.  I don't see what's
> > so unreasonable about that.
>
> People who want to use the feature would have to know that it is only
> present if you turn it on. It's like saying "you can use hexadecimal
> integer literals, but you have to turn them on". This wouldn't work:
> people try to use them, find out that it won't work, and assume
> that it's not supported.

This argument is absurd.  If you know that you want Unicode literals
(a NEW FEATURE that has never existed in Python before), you know
enough to learn how to use the feature.

To show you just how absurd that argument is, realize that it is also
an argument for ignoring the entire standard library.  Since people
have to "import re" before using regular expressions, they'll assume
there's no regex support in Python?  Of course not -- part of learning
how to use regexes is that you "import re"; it's in the documentation,
it's in tutorials about regexes, it's how you teach beginners to use
regexes, etc.


-- ?!ng