[Python-Dev] unistr() vs. unicode()

[Guido van Rossum]

Ping wrote in response to a SourceForge mail about MAL's unistr()
checking:

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Wed, 17 Jan 2001 23:51:48 -0800
From:    Ka-Ping Yee <ping@lfw.org>
To:      noreply@sourceforge.net
cc:      mal@lemburg.com, guido@python.org, patches@python.org
Subject: Re: [Patches] [Patch #101664] Add new unistr() builtin + PyObject_Unic
	  ode() C API

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001 noreply@sourceforge.net wrote:
> Comment:
> This patch adds a utility function unistr() which works just like
> the standard builtin str()  -- only that the return value will
> always be a Unicode object.

Sorry for barging in, but i have an issue/question:

Why are unistr() and unicode() two separate functions?

str() performs one task: convert to string.  It can convert anything,
including strings or Unicode strings, numbers, instances, etc.

The other type-named functions e.g. int(), long(), float(), list(),
tuple() are similar in intent.

Why have unicode() just for converting strings to Unicode strings,
and unistr() for converting everything else to a Unicode string?
What does unistr(x) do differently from unicode(x) if x is a string?


- -- ?!ng

------- End of Forwarded Message

(And no, Tim, this did *not* end up in the patches list because I made
Barry remove the reply-to.  SourceForge mails never had reply-to to
begin with.)

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