[Python-Dev] Divorcing str and unicode (no more implicit conversions).

[Josiah Carlson]

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 
> Le lundi 03 octobre 2005 à 14:59 +0200, Fredrik Lundh a écrit :
> > Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> > 
> > > A good rule of thumb is to convert to unicode everything that is
> > > semantically textual
> > 
> > and isn't pure ASCII.
> 
> How can you be sure that something that is /semantically textual/ will
> always remain "pure ASCII" ? That's contradictory, unless your software
> never goes out of the anglo-saxon world (and even...).

Non-unicode text input widgets.  Works great.  Can be had with the ANSI
wxPython installation.

> (it seems to me - I may be mistaken - that modern Windows versions treat
> every string as 16-bit unicode internally. Why are they doing it if it
> is that inefficient?)

Because modern Windows supports all sorts of symbols which are necessary
for certain special English uses (greek symbols for math, etc.), and
trying to have all of them without just using the unicode backend that
is used for all of the international "builds" (isn't it just a language
definition?) anyways, would be a waste of time/effort.

 - Josiah