[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Chris Barker - NOAA Federal]

> Does Unix even support UTF-16 as an encoding? I suppose, these days, it probably does, for reading contents of files created on Windows, etc.

I don't think Unix supports any encodings at all for the _contents_ of
files -- that's up to applications. Of course the command line text
processing tools need to know -- I'm guessing those are never going to
work w/UTF-16!

"System encoding" is a nice idea, but pretty much worthless. Only
helpful for files created and processed on the same system -- not rare
for that not to be the case.

This brings up the other key problem. If file names are (almost)
arbitrary bytes, how do you write one to/read one from a text file
with a particular encoding? ( or for that matter display it on a
terminal)

And people still want to say posix isn't broken in this regard?

Sigh.

-Chris