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

[Bill Janssen]

> > - yet others think: "I want all of Unicode, with proper, efficient
> >    indexing, so I want four bytes per char".
> 
> I doubt the last one though. Probably they really don't want efficient
> indexing, they want to perform higher-level operations that currently
> are only possible using efficient indexing or slicing. With the right
> API. perhaps they could work just as efficiently with an internal
> representation of UTF-8.

I just got mail this morning from a researcher who wants exactly what
Martin described, and wondered why the default MacPython 2.4.2 didn't
provide it by default. :-)

Bill