[Python-Dev] Allowing Unicode literals even without Unicode support?

[Martin v. Loewis]

Tim Peters <tim.one@comcast.net> writes:

> [Michael Hudson, on the joys of --disable-unicode]
> > ...
> > Anyone feel like digging into any of the above?
> 
> Not me.  I'm not even clear on why we want to support --disable-unicode.  We
> believe Unicode is the future or we don't.

People have requested this because they were shocked of the increase
in size of the Python interpreter, which primarily originates from the
Unicode character database. While I think people would get over their
shock as time passes, I think creating a "small" interpreter for
special-purpose applications is desirable, and just deleting Unicode
support in such a build was (and still is) a low-hanging fruit.

That said, I see no reason why the test suite should pass in such a
build. I would suggest to let this code rot (as long as you can still
build the interpreter without Unicode), and wait for users to complain
that features don't work in disable-unicode builds that they think
should work.

Maybe we can take this feature out in P3k when we find that nobody
uses it. Until then, I would propose to leave it roughly at the state
of WITHOUT_COMPLEX. Does anybody know whether the test suite passes if
you build WITHOUT_COMPLEX?

Regards,
Martin