[Python-Dev] Allowing u.encode() to return non-strings

["Martin v. Löwis"]

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>> -1. I find it unfortunate that there are encodings which
>> don't convert between Unicode and byte strings; this direction
>> should not be followed.
>>
>> Instead, text processing utilities should be proper libraries.
> 
> 
> I don't understand... codecs are not limited to only text
> processing. It's a completely independent framework from the
> Unicode sub-system.

I know this is viewed, and perhaps even documented, as a
framework independent of Unicode. I think this is a mistake,
and it should have been constrained to character encodings
(i.e. conversions to and from Unicode, using character tables
or similar algorithms) right from the beginning.

Regards,
Martin