[Python-Dev] please consider changing --enable-unicode default to ucs4

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 7 Oct, 2009, at 22:13, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>>
>> On 7 Oct, 2009, at 20:05, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> If we do go for a change, we should use sizeof(wchar_t)
>>> as basis for the new default - on all platforms that
>>> provide a wchar_t type.
>>
>> I'd be -1 on that. Sizeof(wchar_t) is 4 on OSX, but all non-Unix  
>> API's
>> that deal with Unicode text use ucs16.
>
> Is that true for non-Carbon APIs as well ?
>
> This is what I found on the web (in summary):
>
> Apple chose to go with UTF-16 at about the same time as Microsoft did
> and used sizeof(wchar_t) == 2 for Mac OS. When they moved to Mac OS X,
> they switched wchar_t to sizeof(wchar_t) == 4.
>

Both Carbon and the modern APIs use UTF-16.

What I don't quite get in the UTF-16 vs. UTF-32 discussion is why  
UTF-32 would be useful, because if you want to do generic Unicode  
processing you have to look at sequences of composed characters (base  
characters + composing marks) anyway instead of separate code points.   
Not that I'm a unicode expert in any way...

Ronald

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