Toby Dickenson wrote at 2003-7-29 19:02 +0100:
On Friday 25 July 2003 19:29, Dieter Maurer wrote:
... Due to this default encoding, I save me from myriads of encoding errors and make interactive debugging feasible. Surely, you will understand, that I do not want to add an "encode('iso-8859-1')" to any value I output with "print" during interactive debugging.
Yes. I work in a mostly utf-8 world, and I originally wanted Python's unicode support to work somewhat like you are using it when first pioneering unicode in Zope. Guido convinced me otherwise:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/i18n-sig/581409 (last paragraph in particular)
I read the explanation but I am not convinced. While I agree fully that modules and packages destined to be used world wide (such as Zope) should not make any assumptions about the default encoding (I think, "[cp]DocumentTemplate" is buggy in this respect), I feel strongly that Python should provide means to determine the default encoding and do not fix it to an US standard. I live in an "ISO-8859-15" world. Terminal, file system, servers all use this encoding. Especially for interactive use of the Python interpreter, it would be *really* nasty to have each (potential) unicode string explicitely encoded in the *true* default encoding of my environment. Python currently restricts the use of "setdefaultencoding" to the initialization time. I can live with this restriction as I would not change it afterwards, anyway. I faintly remember that Guido has reservations about locale support. Nevertheless, it is a good step to let software adapt to the environment it is used in. In my view, the default encoding is a similar device which allows Python's Unicode support to adapt to the defaults employed where Python programs are executed (rather than favour US usage only).
I did not met any library that has had problems with this -- neither Zope nor any other Python library I am using.
I think that is similar to how many people used those pentiums with the fdiv bug without noticing a problem.
I know that there is no device completely faultless. Nevertheless, I am using many of them. I would not have been worried when I had observed that I use a Pentium with the "fdiv" bug (as I do not control power plants, airline or similar sensible systems but just develop software. The worst thing which may happen it that I spend some hours trying to find the reason for an apparently unexplainable behaviour). Dieter