On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Glenn Linderman
It would seem helpful if the stdlib could have some support for efficient handling of Unicode characters in some representation. It would help address the class of applications that does care.
I claim that we have insufficient understanding of their needs to put anything in the stdlib. Wait and see is a good strategy here.
Adding extra support for Unicode character handling sooner rather than later could be an performance boost to applications that do care about full character support, and I can only see the numbers of such applications increasing over time. Such could be built as a subtype of str, perhaps, but if done in Python, there would likely be a significant performance hit when going from str to "unicodeCharacterStr".
Sounds like overengineering to me. The right time to add something to the stdlib is when a large number of apps *currently* need something, not when you expect that they might need it in the future. (There just are too many possible futures to plan for them all. YAGNI rules.) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)