[Python-Dev] PEP 393 Summer of Code Project

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Glenn Linderman <v+python at g.nevcal.com> wrote:
> It would seem helpful if the stdlib could have some support for efficient
> handling of Unicode characters in some representation.  It would help
> address the class of applications that does care.

I claim that we have insufficient understanding of their needs to put
anything in the stdlib. Wait and see is a good strategy here.

> Adding extra support for
> Unicode character handling sooner rather than later could be an performance
> boost to applications that do care about full character support, and I can
> only see the numbers of such applications increasing over time.  Such could
> be built as a subtype of str, perhaps, but if done in Python, there would
> likely be a significant performance hit when going from str to
> "unicodeCharacterStr".

Sounds like overengineering to me. The right time to add something to
the stdlib is when a large number of apps *currently* need something,
not when you expect that they might need it in the future. (There just
are too many possible futures to plan for them all. YAGNI rules.)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)