[Python-Dev] other "magic strings" issues

[Barry Warsaw]

On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 12:35, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Hm, I'd forgotten about ascii_letters.  It would make a beautiful
> class attribute of str.
> 
> I *do* think that we don't need string.letters -- the only use for it
> I've seen is checking if a character is in that string, and
> c.isletter() is faster.

Ah gotcha.  I'd definitely want to retain ascii_letters, probably
ascii_lowercase and ascii_uppercase, digits, hexdigits, octdigits,
punctuation, printable, and whitespace.  I'm not sure about the locale
specific constants, but maybe we do something like:

str.ascii.letters
str.ascii.lowercase
str.locale.letters
str.locale.lowercase

I'd definitely want to make these all read-only, e.g. removing the
undefined warnings for string.lowercase.

-Barry