[Python-Dev] Re: PEP: Defining Unicode Literal Encodings (revision 1.1)

[David Eppstein]

On 7/17/01 9:33 AM -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
> > I tend to think putting anything at all in the text of the file is a
> > hack and not a clean design -- this is meta-information rather than
> > content, right?
>
> What is the practical problem with mixing "meta-information" and
> "content"?

Files get transferred via protocols that change information such as text 
encodings, so meta-information stored within the file gets out of synch. 
If one instead uses external meta-information available to the protocols 
(such as MIME types with http) this can be less of a problem.

In the real world, we have to deal with file systems that don't provide 
for storing external metadata, so putting the encoding within the file 
makes sense, I just wanted to be clear that it doesn't strike me as 
totally clean.
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/