Steven D'Aprano wrote:
(1) I asked if it would be okay for MicroPython to *optionally* use nominally Unicode strings limited to ASCII. Pretty much the only response to this as been Guido saying "That would be a pretty lousy option",
It would be limiting to have this as the *only* way of dealing with unicode, but I don't see anything wrong with having this available as an option for applications that truly don't need anything more than ascii. There must be plenty of those; the controller that runs my car engine, for example, doesn't exchange text with the outside world at all.
The rationale of internal UTF-8 is that the use of any other encoding internally will be inefficient since those strings will need to be transcoded to UTF-8 before they can be written or printed,
No, I think the rationale is that UTF-8 is likely to use less memory than UTF-16 or UTF-32. -- Greg