Chris Barker writes: > I think the "better error message" option is the way to go, > however. At least until we all have better Unicode support in all > our tools....
I don't think "better Unicode support" helps with confusables in programming languages that value TOOWTDI. OK, we already have 4 kinds of quoting in Python which suggests that TOOWTDI doesn't apply to quoting, but I think that's a bit naive. Given the frequency with which quotes appear in strings, and the fact that English quotation marks can't nest but rarely need to nest more than once, use of both "" and '' with identical semantics to make one level of nesting convenient and readable was plausible. The use of triple quotes for block quoting again has arguments for it. You can think that these were experiments with "meh" results[1], but I don't think it's appropriate to say that therefore TOOWTDI doesn't apply to quote marks. As a general rule, I think use of confusables in new syntax (eg, double curly quotes = f"") runs into "Syntax shall not look like grit on Tim's screen". OTOH, better Unicode support should (cautiously) be used to support new operators and syntax subject to TOOWDTI and other considerations of Pythonicity. Footnotes: [1] Personally, I immediately liked the triple quotes, because the (Emacs) Lisp convention of allowing literal newline characters in all strings caused a number of small annoyances. I also quickly evolved a personal convention where single quotes indicate "string as protocol constant" (eg, where today we'd use enums), while double quotes indicate "arbitrary text content". But those are both obviously YMMV evaluations. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
