[issue9598] untabify.py fails on files that contain non-ascii characters

[Éric Araujo]

Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> added the comment:

>> I wouldn’t want to see names of authors/contributors mangled
>> in the source.
> 
> This is a reason to write names in ASCII.

Oh, sorry, by “mangled” I meant “forced into ASCII”. I was not speaking about mojibake.

> While Latin-1 is a grey area because most of [its] characters look familiar
> to English-speaking developers,

I don’t think there is an argument for Latin-1. Also, Latin-1 does not have characters but bytes, which are displayed as characters by good editors, like UTF-8 bytes are. The discussion is about ASCII versus UTF-8 in my opinion, let Latin-1 rest in peace.

> I don't think you will easily recognize my name if I write it in Cyrillic
> and even if you do, chances are you would not be able to search for it.

Not so good example, since I’ve seen your name in the thread about Misc/ACKS sorting and could recognize it, by I get your idea :)

To search, I would use the “search for word under cursor” functionality.

> On the other hand, everyone who uses e-mail is likely to have a preferred
> ASCII spelling of his/her name.

Well, some languages have rules to handle constrained environments, like German who may use oe for ö or Italian E' for È, but for example in French there is no such workaround. Leaving accents out of words is a spelling error, nothing more or less. When I’m forced to change my name because of broken old tools I really feel the programmers behind the tool could do better. (I happen to have an ASCII-compatible nickname, which I prefer using to the ASCII-maimed version of my name where I can.)

I feel 2010 is very late to accept that we live in a wide world and that people should be able to just use their names with computer systems.

By the way, you still haven’t retitled this bug to address my other remark :)

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue9598>
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