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

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Neil Hodgson wrote:
>    I'd like to more tightly define Unicode strings for Python 3000.
> Currently, Unicode strings may be implemented with either 2 byte
> (UCS-2) or 4 byte (UTF-32) elements. Python should allow strings to
> contain any Unicode character and should be indexable yielding
> characters rather than half characters. Therefore Python strings
> should appear to be UTF-32. There could still be multiple
> implementations (using UTF-16 or UTF-8) to preserve space but all
> implementations should appear to be the same apart from speed and
> memory use.

That's very tricky. If you have multiple implementations, you make
usage at the C API difficult. If you make it either UTF-8 or UTF-32,
you make PythonWin difficult. If you make it UTF-16, you make indexing
difficult.

Regards,
Martin