Yes, if internal things that has been accessible from the outside disappear we better speculate that somebody is using them. It's a matter of threshold when compatibility goo becomes necessary. I'd say that if the thing hardly can be considered useful and if no reported use of it exists then it isn't necessary, but in this case we know it's used.
We can only blame the user if there's a comment or similar that says the thing is internal, but that isn't the case with the ascii class in 7.4. Given that autodoc comments overall still is fragmentary I don't think it's enough that the lack of such a comment is enough. I.e. I don't think rjb had bad judgement when he saw the class in the module and decided to use it.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-05-24 12:22: Subject: Locale.Charset.ascii
The _de facto_ issue is that rjb used it. The rest is speculation. We could just as well speculate that somebody else is using some other totally internal class in some other module. I don't think we should have compatibility goo for things that should not be used by programs in the first place.
Using this particular class isn't even meaningful.
/ Marcus Comstedt (ACROSS) (Hail Ilpalazzo!)