On 4 April 2015 at 02:09, David Crayford <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you read what van Rossum said he was quite happy for python to run on > EBCDIC machines he just didn't want the EBCDIC patches littering the Python > source code and suggested maintaining a seperate patch.
Well that's not exactly the way I remember it. The proponent(s) of EBCDIC support suggested that what python needed was to view characters as entities independent of their encoding (my paraphrase), and van Rossum firmly and condescendingly rejected that view, comparing the hard-codedness of the ASCII representation to choices like 2s-complement integer representation, and having 8-bit bytes. (I wonder if he believes that little-endian integers were also handed down from heaven...) > I for one agree with him. > Perl is a case in point. When the original authors of the EBCDIC > patches took off nobody wanted to maintain EBCDIC and there was a massive > amount of technical debt left in the Perl base source code. Last thing I > heard the Perl maintainers were giving serious consideration to removing the > EBCDIC patches from Perl. Sure. But if the original authors had coded generally, i.e. without putting the assumptions of ASCII in at a low level, then surely the patches would be small and easily kept mainstream. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
