[M.-A. Lemburg]
> Jack had the same question. The simple answer is: we need this
> in order to maintain backward compatibility when we move to
> phase two of the implementation.
>
> Here's the longer one:
>
> ASCII is the standard encoding for Python keywords and identifiers.
> There is no standard source code encoding for string literals.
But there is:
Python uses the 7-bit ASCII character set for program text and
string literals. 8-bit characters may be used in string literals
and comments but their interpretation is platform dependent; the
proper way to insert 8-bit characters in string literals is by
using octal or hexadecimal escape sequences.
The Ref Man has said "7-bit ASCII" for both "program text and string
literals" for a long time. The formal grammar in the Ref Man agrees with
this (including the formal grammar for Unicode literals). It's an
historical accident that the tokenizer happened to use C isalpha() to
"enforce" this for identifiers, and that C isalpha() happened to grow
locale-dependence while Guido was too drunk with power to notice <wink>.
> Unicode literals are interpreted using 'unicode-escape' which
> is an enhanced Latin-1 with escape semantics.
I'm sure they *do* "act like" Latin-1 on your box, and that identifiers also
act like Latin-1 was in effect on your box. But the Ref Man explicitly says
all that is platform dependent; there's no "backward compatibility" to
preserve here beyond 7-bit ASCII unless you want to preserve that Python
always rely on what C isalpha() says.
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