[Python-Dev] Support for "wide" Unicode characters

[Aahz Maruch]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> On wide Python builds there is no such thing as variable width Unicode
> characters. It doesn't make sense to combine two 32-bit characters to
> get a 64-bit one. On narrow Python builds you might want to treat a
> surrogate pair as a single character but I would strongly advise against
> it. If you want wide characters, move to a wide build. Even if a narrow
> build is more space efficient, you'll lose a ton of performance
> emulating wide characters in Python code.

This needn't go into the PEP, I think, but I'd like you to say something
about what you expect the end result of this PEP to look like under
Windows, where "rebuild" isn't really a valid option for most Python
users.  Are we simply committing to make two builds available?  If so,
what happens the next time we run into a situation like this?
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