moving to unicode (was re: PEP)

Neil Hodgson neilh at scintilla.org
Wed Aug 9 21:16:05 EDT 2000


> If someone wants to write their Python code and write their comments and
> string literals in Hebrew, then I can see how handy this would be for
them,
> but I wonder how much complexity it's going to throw on the backs of the
> other 90% of the world's developers who are already used to writing and
> reading ASCII files exclusively.

   I think you have underestimated the proportion of programmers who
routinely use non-ASCII representations. Not only do East-Asian programmers
generally use national scripts, those programmers in 'ASCII-only' countries
who need to collaborate on such software need to deal with this.

   My guess (and it is only a guess based on my personal experience) is that
possibly 25% of programmers need to deal with non-Roman character sets
currently and if you include the use of accented characters outside ASCII in
European languages it'd be over half.

   Neil





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