[Python-Dev] ascii.py?
Eric S. Raymond
esr@thyrsus.com
Fri, 2 Jun 2000 01:43:54 -0400
Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>:
> "Eric S. Raymond" wrote:
> >
> > There has been a vast and echoing silence about the ascii.py module I
> > posted here at Fred Drake's request. Is it really such a bad idea?
>
> Without looking closely, or even being particularly knowledgable (how's
> that for a disclaimer!) my instinctive reaction was: "does the ASCII
> subset of Unicode need its own module just before we add Unicode to the
> language?"
>
> It may be that there are some semantics of ASCII that are not captured
> in the Unicode spec. and thus are not generalizable.
ascii.ctrl is one such.
> I'm pretty
> confident that these ones ARE generalizable:
>
> isalnum
> isalpha
> isascii
> islower
> isupper
> isspace
> isxdigit
>
> How do Unicode users get this information from the famous Unicode
> database and why not merge the Unicode and ASCII versions in 1.6?
Answer: ascii.py is not designed for text processing. I wrote it to package
some functions useful for classifying *ASCII* data, especially in the
context of roguelike programs that interpret keystrokes coming in through
a curses interface.
(Where this all touches ground is CML2, my replacement configuration
system for the Linux kernel.)
--
<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>
..every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any
Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his
Hands, we may say, are properly his. .... The great and chief end
therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves
under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.
-- John Locke, "A Treatise Concerning Civil Government"