[Python-Dev] UCS2/UCS4 default

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> The premise of this thread seems to be that the majority should suffer for
> the benefit of a few.  That is not Python's philosophy.

Who are the many here? Who are the few? I'd venture that (at least for
the foreseeable future, say, until China will finally have taken over
the role of the US as the de-facto dominant super power :-) the many
are people whose app will never see a Unicode character outside the
BMP, or who do such minimal string processing that their code doesn't
care whether it's handling UTF-16-encoded data.

Python's philosophy is also Practicality Beats Purity.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)