[Python-3000] Unicode strings, identifiers, and import

[Michael Urman]

On 5/13/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> The answer to all of this is the filesystem encoding, which is already
> supported. Doesn't appear particularly difficult to me.

Okay, that's fair. It seems reasonable to accept the limitations of
following the filesystem encoding for module names. I should probably
test py3k to make sure it already has updated __import__ to use the
filesystem encoding instead of the default encoding, but instead I'll
just feebly imply the question here.

Further thoughts related to this lead me to ask if there is to be only
the version of open() which takes a unicode string, of if there will
also be the opportunity to pass a byte string which doesn't pass
through the encoding. It's far too common for Linux users to have
files named with different encodings than their environment suggests.
If it's only possible to open files whose names can be decoded via the
filesystem encoding, I foresee several unhappy end-user experiences.
-- 
Michael Urman