[Python-Dev] Unicode debate

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

Andrew M. Kuchling writes:
>Guido van Rossum writes:
>My suggested criterion is that 1.6 not screw things up in a way that
>we'll regret when 1.7 rolls around.  UTF-8 probably does back us into
>a corner that 

Doh!  To complete that paragraph: Magic conversions assuming UTF-8
does back us into a corner that is hard to get out of later.  Magic
conversions assuming Latin1 or ASCII are a bit better, but I'd lean
toward the draconian solution: we don't know what we're doing, so do
nothing and require the user to explicitly convert between Unicode and
8-bit strings in a user-selected encoding.

--amk