On 23.07.2012 14:55, Roy Smith wrote: > In article <500d0632$0$1504$c3e8da3$76491...@news.astraweb.com>, > Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > >> Technically, no, it's a SyntaxError, because the Original Poster has used >> some sort of "Smart Quotes" characters r’‘ instead of good old fashioned >> typewriter-style quotes r'' or r"". >> >> If you're going to ask programming questions using an email client that >> changes what you type, including smart quotes, special hyphens or other >> characters, you're going to have a bad time. > > Some day, we're going to have programming languages that take advantage > of the full unicode character set. Right now, we're working in ASCII > and creating silly digrams/trigrams like r'' for raw strings (and > triple-quotes for multi-line > strings). Not to mention <=, >=, ==, !=. And in languages other than > python, things like ->, => (arrows for structure membership), and so on.
I disagree. Firstly, Python could already support the different types of strings even with the ASCII character set. For example, the choice could have made to treat the apostophe string 'foo' differently from the double quote string "foo". Then, the backtick could have been used `foo`. Bash for example uses all three and all three have very different meanings. Python is different: explicit is better than implicit, and I'd rather have the "r" the signifies what weird magic is going on instead of having some weird language rules. It would not be different with some UTF-8 "rawstring" magic backticks. Secondly, there's a reason that >=, <= and friends are in use. Every keyboard has a > key and every keyboard has a = key. I don't know any that would have >=, <= or != as UTF-8. It is useful to use only a limited set of characters. And if I think of PHP's latest fiasco that happened with unicode characters, it makes me shudder to think you'd want that stuff in Python. If I remember correctly, it was the Turkish locale that they stuggled with: Turkey apparently does not have a capital "I", so some weird PHP magic code broke with the Turkish locale in effect. Having to keep crap like that in mind is just plain horrible. I'm very happy with the way Python does it. Best regards, Henrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
