[I18n-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] Pre-PEP: Python Character Model

[Paul Prescod]

Let me say one more thing.

Unicode and string types are *already widely interoperable*. 

You run into problems:

 a) when you try to convert a character greater than 128. In my opinion
this is just a poor design decision that can be easily reversed

 b) some code does an explicit check for types.StringType which of
course is not compatible with types.UnicodeType. This can only be fixed
by merging the features of types.StringType and types.UnicodeType so
that they can be the same object. This is not as trivial as the other
fix in terms of lines of code that must change but conceptually it
doesn't seem complicated at all.

I think a lot of Unicode interoperability problems would just go away if
"a" was fixed...

 Paul Prescod