[Python-Dev] PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349? [ Was:Re: release plan for 2.5 ?]

[Guido van Rossum]

On 2/13/06, Adam Olsen <rhamph at gmail.com> wrote:
> What would that imply for repr()?  To support eval(repr(x)) it would
> have to produce whatever format the source code includes to begin
> with.

I'm not sure that's a requirement. (I do think that in 2.x,
str(bytes(s)) == s should hold as long as type(s) == str.)

> If I understand correctly there's three main candidates:
> 1. Direct copying to str in 2.x, pretending it's latin-1 in unicode in 3.x

I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you're thinking that the
repr() of a bytes object created from bytes('abc\xf0') would be

  bytes('abc\xf0')

under this rule. What's so bad about that?

> 2. Direct copying to str/unicode if it's only ascii values, switching
> to a list of hex literals if there's any non-ascii values

That works for me too. But why hex literals? As MvL stated, a list of
decimals would be just as useful.

> 3. b"foo" literal with ascii for all ascii characters (other than \
> and "), \xFF for individual characters that aren't ascii
>
> Given the choice I prefer the third option, with the second option as
> my runner up.  The first option just screams "silent errors" to me.

The 3rd is out of the running for many reasons.

I'm not sure I understand your "silent errors" fear; can you elaborate?

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)