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On 28 Nov 2003, Martin v. [iso-8859-15] Löwis wrote:

MvL> > 1. What is the reason to encode source code to utf-8?
MvL>
MvL> I think it is because Just found that the most
MvL> straight-forward thing
MvL> to do: UTF-8 supports all Unicode characters, and you have
MvL> to choose
MvL> *some* encoding, as the resulting byte strings need to be
MvL> encoded
MvL> somehow.

Why we have to choose one particular encoding and not just assume
all strings to be unicode?

MvL> In addition, anybody desiring a different encoding can
MvL> explicitly
MvL> invoke .encode()

Surely. But there is no way to emulate "python -U" behavior for
compiled piece of code.

--
Denis S. Otkidach
http://www.python.ru/ [ru]

"Denis S. Otkidach" <> writes:

> Why we have to choose one particular encoding and not just assume
> all strings to be unicode?

Assume the source code reads

source = u"""
f=open("/etc/passwd","a")
f.write("news:9:13:News system:/etc/news:/bin/bash\n")
"""

What data type should the argument of f.write have, in this example?

If the answer is not <type 'str'>, you would cause many compatibility
problems.

> Surely. But there is no way to emulate "python -U" behavior for
> compiled piece of code.

However, python -U does not currently work. When it does, exposing it
separately to compile() might be reasonable. OTOH, the current
behaviour might be sufficient: If -U is passed, strings created in
compile would automatically be Unicode strings - which is the case
today.

Regards,
Martin