Multibyte Character Surport for Python

Martin v. Loewis martin at v.loewis.de
Sat May 11 09:22:29 EDT 2002


"John Roth" <johnroth at ameritech.net> writes:

> I just read that PEP. As far as I'm concerned, it's not solved, the
> solution would be much worse than the disease. Python is noted
> for simplicity and one way to do most things. PEP 263 (outside of
> syntax issues) simply obfuscates the issue for quite minor returns.

Any specific objection?

> > That sounds terrible. Are you sure you can implement this? For
> > example, what about the Cyrillic-based languages? Are you also
> > treating them as one for simplicity? Can you produce a complete list
> > of languages, and for each one, a complete list of characters?
> 
> I believe that the Unicode Consortium has already considered this.
> After all, they didn't just add character encodings at random; they've
> got specific support for many, many languages. I don't need to
> repeat their work, and much more importantly, neither does the
> core Python language team.

Ok, can you then kindly direct me to the relevant database? To my
knowledge, the Unicode consortium does *not* maintain this very data
(although they do maintain data that, at a shallow glance, look
related).

> > That is even more terrible. So far, nobody has proposed to translate
> > Python keywords. How are you going to implement that: i.e. can you
> > produce a list of keywords for each language? How would I spell 'def'
> > in German?
> 
> AFIC, spelling is up to people who want to code in a particular
> language.

I'm telling you: I speak German, and I did a lot of software
localization work, but I couldn't find an acceptable translation for
any of the Python keywords which wouldn't sound outright silly.

> I haven't considered implementation, but it seems like it should be
> incredibly simple, given that point 4 means that syntax words are
> easily distinguishable by the lexer. Think in terms of a dictionary,
> although performance considerations probably means that something
> faster would be necessary.

Indeed, implementing this would be the easier part - obtaining the
data is difficult.

Regards,
Martin



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