[Python-Dev] PEP 460 reboot

[Greg Ewing]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> The
> mini-language parser has to assume in encoding in order to interpret
> the format string, and that's *all* done assuming an ASCII compatible
> format string (which must make life interesting if you try to use an
> ASCII incompatible coding cookie for your source code

I don't think it's all *that* interesting. As long as you're
able to type the relevant characters on your keyboard and
have them displayed in a recognisable way in your editor,
then what looks like b"Content-Length: %d" in your source
will end up encoded as ascii in the bytes object, whatever
the encoding of the source file.

If the source file uses an encoding that can't even represent
the formatting characters, then you're in trouble -- but
you'd have a hard time writing Python code at all in such
an environment!

> It's certainly a decision that has its downsides, with the potential
> impact on users of ASCII incompatible encodings (mostly in Asia) being
> the main one,

I don't think it will have much impact on them, other
than maybe they will find less use cases for it. But the
main intended use cases are for things like http headers
which have protocol-mandated ascii-ish bits, and those
bits are still just as ascii-ish in China as they are
anywhere else.

-- 
Greg