[Zope3-dev] Re: Getting rid of ASCII schema field

[Jim Fulton]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> 
>> one last ward in the schema package remains: the ASCII field. Maybe 
>> there's a deeper reason for its existence, I certainly can't see it. 
>> 8-byte strings should be stored with the Bytes field. Morover, ASCII 
>> is totally equivalent to the Bytes field, so it doesn't even make a 
>> difference. The few times where it's used in the Zope 3 source I see 
>> no reason for not using Bytes.
>>
>> Unless someone has the mercy to enlighten me what ASCII could possibly 
>> be useful for, I will remove it next week :).
> 
> 
> -1.  Using an ASCII field documents an intent to store only 
> "7-bit-clean" values in the string;  no characters > DEL (chr(127)) 
> should be allowed.  A number of applications exist which require such a 
> constraint (think RFC 822 headers, for instance).

Well said.

> If, in fact, the ASCII field does not *enforce* that constraint, then we 
> should remedy that.

Yup. That remedy is needed. Further, the doc strings don't make this intent clear
either.

I submitted a collector issue.

Jim

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