[C++-sig] Some thoughts on py3k support

[Haoyu Bai]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:52 AM, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve wrote:
>>
>> C++ has wchar_t and std::wstring. Could these be leveraged to avoid
>> ambiguities?
>> E.g. char, std::string are mapped to py3 byte objects, wchar_t and
>> std::wstring
>> to py3 str objects.
>>
>
> I don't quite agree with that suggestion. First, wchar_t doesn't imply
> Unicode (and char doesn't exclude it !). Second, I do want my existing
> string functions (whether they use 'std::string' or 'char const *') to keep
> operating on strings, not byte buffers.
> I believe the only way to avoid ambiguities is by allowing / requesting
> users to explicitly set a policy.
>
> Thanks,
>      Stefan
>

Yes of course we should allow users to set policy. So the problem is
what the default behavior should be when there is no policy set by
user explicitly. The candidates are:

- raise an error
- convert char* and std::string to/from Python bytes
- convert char* and std::string to/from Python 3 unicode string.

I personally like the last one because it would keep most of the
existing code compatible.

Thanks!

-- Haoyu Bai