[Python-Dev] New Py_UNICODE doc

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Nicholas Bastin wrote:
> It's not always 2 bytes on Windows.  Users can alter the config options
> (and not unreasonably so, btw, on 64-bit windows platforms).

Did you try that? I'm not sure it even builds when you do so, but if it
does, you will lose the "mbcs" codec, and the ability to use Unicode
strings as file names. Without the "mbcs" codec, I would expect that
quite a lot of the Unicode stuff breaks.

> You can't build a binary extension module on windows and
> assume that Py_UNICODE is 2 bytes, because that's not enforced in any
> way.  The same is true for 4-byte Py_UNICODE on RHL9.

Depends on how much force you want to see. That the official pydotorg
Windows installer python24.dll uses a 2-byte Unicode, and that a lot
of things break if you change Py_UNICODE to four bytes on Windows
(including PythonWin) is a pretty strong guarantee that you won't
see a Windows Python build with UCS-4 for quite some time.

Regards,
Martin