[Python-Dev] New Py_UNICODE doc

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Nicholas Bastin wrote:
> On May 4, 2005, at 6:03 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> 
> 
>>Nicholas Bastin wrote:
>>
>>>"This type represents the storage type which is used by Python
>>>internally as the basis for holding Unicode ordinals.  Extension 
>>>module
>>>developers should make no assumptions about the size of this type on
>>>any given platform."
>>
>>But people want to know "Is Python's Unicode 16-bit or 32-bit?"
>>So the documentation should explicitly say "it depends".
> 
> 
> The important piece of information is that it is not guaranteed to be a 
> particular one of those sizes.  Once you can't guarantee the size, no 
> one really cares what size it is.  The documentation should discourage 
> developers from attempting to manipulate Py_UNICODE directly, which, 
> other than trivia, is the only reason why someone would care what size 
> the internal representation is.

I don't see why you shouldn't use Py_UNICODE buffer directly.
After all, the reason why we have that typedef is to make it
possible to program against an abstract type - regardless of
its size on the given platform.

In that respect it is similar to wchar_t (and all the other
*_t typedefs in C).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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