From: Tim Peters [mailto:tim_one@email.msn.com]

[Tim]

...

... Don't know how long it will take this half of the world to realize it, but UCS-4 is inevitable.

[Bill Tutt]

...

On new systems perhaps, but important existing systems (Win32, and probably Java) are stuck with that bad decision and have to use UTF-16 for backward compatability purposes.

Somehow that doesn't strike me as a good reason for Python to mimic them <wink>.

So don't. If you think UTF-16 is yet another bad engineering decision, then take the hit now of making Python's unicode support natively UCS-4 so we don't have a backward compatability problem when the next Unicode or ISO 10646 revision comes out. Just realize and accept the cost of doing so. (constant conversions for a nice big chunk of your users.)

...

Surrogates aren't as far out as you might think. (The next rev of the Unicode spec)

But indeed, that's the *point*: they exhausted their 64K space in just a few years. Now the same experts say that adding 4 bits to the range will suffice for all time; I don't buy it; they picked 4 bits because that's what the surrogate mechanism was defined earlier to support.

I don't think the experts are saying the extra 4 bits will suffice for all time, but it should certainly suffice until we meet aliens form a different planet. :)

...

That's certainly sooner than Win32 going away. :)

I hope it stays around forever -- it's a great object lesson in what optimizing for yesterday's hardware can buy you <wink>.

Heh. A dev manager from Excel made the exact same comment to me just yesterday. :) Bill