[Python-3000] PEP Draft: Enhancing the buffer protcol

[Guido van Rossum]

On 2/28/07, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:
>
> Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> wrote:
> > Josiah Carlson wrote:
> > >Travis Oliphant <oliphant.travis at ieee.org> wrote:
> > >>I think you are right.  In the discussions for unifying string/unicode I
> > >>really like the proposals that are leaning toward having a unicode
> > >>object be an immutable string of either ucs-1, ucs-2, or ucs-4 depending
> > >>on what is in the string.
> > >
> > >Except that its not going to happen.  The width of the unicode
> > >representation is going to be fixed at compile time, generally utf-16 or
> > >ucs-4.
> >
> > Are you sure about this?  Guido was still talking about the
> > multiple-version representation at PyCon a few days ago.
>
> I was thinking of Guido's message from August 31, 2006 with the subject
> of "Re: [Python-3000] UTF-16", in that message he states that he would
> like it to be a configure (presumably during compilation) option.
>
> If he's talking about different runtime representations, then there's an
> entire thread discussing it with the subject of "How will unicode get
> used?" in September of 2006, and an earlier thread prior to that.  While
> I was an early proponent of 'represent minimally', I'm not terribly
> worried about it either way at this point, and was merely attempting to
> state what had been expressed in the past.

I haven't been following that as closely as perhaps I should have. I'd
be glad to drop this and go back to a string
representation/implementation that's essentially the 2.x unicode type,
with a compile-time configuration choice between 16 or 32 bits wide
characters only.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)