Just van Rossum writes:
At 10:07 AM +0100 05-05-2000, Toby Dickenson wrote:
One other pleasant consequence:
- String comparisons work character-by character, even if the representation of those characters have different widths.
Exactly. By saying "(wide) strings are not tied to Unicode" the question whether wide strings should or should not be sorted according to the Unicode spec is answered by a simple "no", instead of "hmm, maybe, but it's too hard anyway"...
Wait a second. There is nothing about Unicode that would prevent you from defining string equality as byte-level equality. This strikes me as the wrong way to deal with the complex collation issues of Unicode. It seems to me that by default wide-strings compare at the byte-level (i.e., '=' is a byte level comparison). If you want a normalized comparison, then you make an explicit function call for that. This is no different from comparing strings in a case sensitive vs. case insensitive manner. -tree -- Tom Emerson Basis Technology Corp. Language Hacker http://www.basistech.com "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever"