[Python-Dev] Unicode

[Skip Montanaro]

    Guido> Also, once 8-bit strings are used for binary data only, I wonder
    Guido> if they shouldn't be more like Java's byte arrays --
    Guido> i.e. mutable.  And they don't need a literal notation.  That's
    Guido> another major language change. :-(

How so?  In theory, all the ways you write string constructors today would
eventually map to Unicode objects.  I'm thinking of string literals and
constructor functions.  That can be handled with the usual "warn for awhile"
mechanism.  The array module could be used to manipulate mutable arrays of
8-bit data.  While permeating the Python innards with Unicode objects would
be a major change I don't see any big syntactic changes - or is that not
what worries you?

Skip