[I18n-sig] Re: [XML-SIG] Character encodings and expat

[Martin v. Loewis]

> The implementation does use wchar_t where available and usable
> (meaning that sizeof(wchar_t) == 2).

There is probably not much point in rehashing the entire discussion,
but I'd think that wchar_t is usable also more cases; specifically on
Linux, where it is defined to hold ISO 10646 characters. Requiring
that the elements of a Unicode string have only two bytes will cause
problems in the long run, IMHO, since it will lead the way to UTF-16,
which is utter non-sense.

> If you need speed, you can always write your own codecs and
> use them for processing your data. The codec registry is
> open in all directions...

Yes, that is certainly one of the elegant aspects of the Python
Unicode support.

Regards,
Martin