On Tuesday 28 June 2016 14:31, Rustom Mody wrote: > On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 6:36:06 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> On Tue, 28 Jun 2016 12:23 am, Rustom Mody wrote: >> > Also how is GG deliberately downgrading clear unicode content to be kind >> > to obsolete clients at recipient end different from python 2 → 3 making >> > breaking changes but not going beyond ASCII lexemes? >> >> Oh yes, I completely agree, obviously GvR is literally worse than Hitler >> because he hasn't added a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for >> input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to >> Python. >> >> /s > > Gratuitous Godwin acceleration produceth poor sarcasm -- try again > And while you are at it try and answer the parallel: > Unicode has a major pro and con > Pro: Its a superset and enormously richer than ASCII
Correct. > Con: It is costly and implementations are spotty That's a matter of opinion. What do you mean by "spotty"? It seems to me that implementations are mostly pretty good, at least as good as Python 2 narrow builds. Support for astral characters is not as good, but (apart from some Han users, and a few specialist niches) not as import either. The big problem is poor tooling: fonts still have many missing characters, and editors don't make it easy to enter anything not visible on the keyboard. > GG downgrades posts containing unicode if it can, thereby increasing reach to > recipients with unicode-broken clients And how does that encourage clients to support Unicode? It just enables developers to tell themselves "It's just a few weirdos and foreigners who use Unicode, ASCII [by which they mean Latin 1] is good enough for everyone." Its 2016, and it is *way* past time that application developers stop pandering to legacy encodings by making them the default. If developers saw that 99% of emails were UTF-8, they would be less likely to think they could avoid learning about Unicode. > Likewise this: > >> a bunch of Unicode characters with poor support for >> input and worse support for output as essential syntactic elements to >> Python. > > sounds like the same logic applied to python > > JFTR I am not quarrelling with Guido's choices; just pointing out your > inconsistencies Oh, it's inconsistencies plural is it? So I have more than one? :-) In Python 3, source files are treated as UTF-8 by default. That means, if you want to use Unicode characters in your source code (for variable names, comments, or in strings) you can, and you don't have to declare a special encoding. Just save the file in an editor that defaults to UTF-8, and Python is satisfied. If, for some reason, you need some legacy encoding, you can still explicitly set it with a coding cookie at the top of the file. That behaviour is exactly analogous to my position that mail and news clients should default to UTF-8. But in neither case would people be *required* to include Unicode characters in their text. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
