[Note: These discussion should all move to 18n-sig... CCing there]
Christopher Petrilli wrote:
you don't get the same thing out that you put in (at least this is what I've been told by a lot of Japanese developers), and therefore it's not terribly popular because of the nature of the Japanese (and Chinese) langauge.
My experience with Unicode is that a lot of Western people think it's the answer to every problem asked, while most asian language people disagree vehemently. This says the problem isn't solved yet, even if people wish to deny it.
[Marc-Andre Lenburg]
Isn't this a problem of the translation rather than Unicode itself (Andy mentioned several times that you can use the private BMP areas to implement 1-1 round-trips) ?
Maybe, but apparently such high-quality translations are rare (note that Andy said "can"). Anyway, a word of caution here. Years ago I attended a number of IETF meetings on internationalization, in a time when Unicode wasn't as accepted as it is now. The one thing I took away from those meetings was that this is a *highly* emotional and controversial issue. As the Python community, I feel we have no need to discuss "why Unicode." Therein lies madness, controversy, and no progress. We know there's a clear demand for Unicode, and we've committed to support it. The question now at hand is "how Unicode." Let's please focus on that, e.g. in the other thread ("Unicode debate") in i18n-sig and python-dev. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)