[Apologies for sending out a long stream of pointed responses, written before I have fully digested this entire mega-thread. I don't have the patience today to collect them all into a single mega-response.] On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner@haypocalc.com> wrote:
Note: Java and the Qt library use also UTF-16 strings and have exactly the same "limitations" for str[n] and len(str).
Which reminds me. The PEP does not say what other Python implementations besides CPython should do. presumably Jython and IronPython will continue to use UTF-16, so presumably the language reference will still have to document that strings contain code units (not code points) and the objections Tom Christiansen raised against this will remain true for those versions of Python. (I don't know about PyPy, they can presumably decide when they start their Py3k port.) OTOH perhaps IronPython 3.3 and Jython 3.3 can use a similar approach and we can lay the narrow build issues to rest? Can someone here speak for them? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)