[Python-ideas] Proposal for default character representation

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 13.10.2016 01:06, Mikhail V wrote:
> On 12 October 2016 at 23:48, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> The hex notation for \uXXXX is a standard also used in many other
>> programming languages, it's also easier to parse, so I don't
>> think we should change this default.
> 
> In programming literature it is used often, but let me point out that
> decimal is THE standard and is much much better standard
> in sence of readability. And there is no solid reason to use 2 standards
> at the same time.

I guess it's a matter of choosing the right standard for the
right purpose. For \uXXXX and \UXXXXXXXX the intention was to be able
to represent a Unicode code point using its standard Unicode ordinal
representation and since the standard uses hex for this, it's
quite natural to use the same here.

>> Take e.g.
>>
>>>>> s = "\u123456"
>>>>> s
>> 'ሴ56'
>>
>> With decimal notation, it's not clear where to end parsing
>> the digit notation.
> 
> How it is not clear if the digit amount is fixed? Not very clear what
> did you mean.

Unicode code points have ordinals from the range [0, 1114111],
so it's not clear where to stop parsing the decimal representation
and continue to interpret the literal as regular string, since
I suppose you did not intend everyone to have to write
\u0000010 just to get a newline code point to avoid the
ambiguity.

PS: I'm not even talking about the breakage such a change would
cause. This discussion is merely about the pointing out how
things got to be how they are now.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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