John Roth wrote:
"Roy Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If Python had originally been invented in a unicode world, I suppose we wouldn't have this problem. We'd just be using guillemots for tuples (and have keyboards which made it easy to type them).
I suppose the forces of darkness will forever keep Python from requiring utf-8 as the source encoding. If I didn't make a fetish of trying to see the good in everybody's position, I could really work up a dislike of the notion that you should be able to use any old text editor for Python source.
It's not so much the desire to be able to use any old text editor that keeps Python in ASCII, it's the desire to use any old *hardware*. Keyboards with guillemots are not exactly a worldwide norm, and needing to remember and type some arcane alt-keycode formula to be able to do basic scripting would be obnoxious, to say the least. Most keyboards worldwide provide decent support for the ASCII character set (though some add a few extra national characters). Perhaps things will change when a majority of the world's programmers use a non-Roman alphabet / character set, but even then there's a significant weight of historical reasons to overcome.
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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