Multibyte Character Surport for Python

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Thu May 9 07:32:30 EDT 2002


>>>>> "Martin" == Martin v Loewis <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:

    Martin> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

    >> What Unicode objects?  They find ordinary strings that are
    >> mandated to be encoded in UTF-8.

    Martin> That could be done,

Glad to have your confirmation.  Now all I need to do is find the
time....

    >> We do the migration to Unicode objects later, at the same time
    >> that you would have done it anyway.  In the meantime, this fits
    >> right in with the kind of "backwards compatibility" that PEP
    >> 263 is all about.

    Martin> You can't use UTF-8 to represent non-ASCII identifiers,
    Martin> and Unicode objects later. Old byte code would not
    Martin> interoperate with new byte code.

_This_ is a serious objection.  But if we're ever going to have
non-ASCII identifiers with some sanity, that transition will have to
be made.  So I guess it never will happen in PSF Python?

Maybe that's for the best.  Francois and my students can write in
their preferred languages, and "official" Python will support Alex's
"one world, one substrate for programming languages" campaign.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert c.l.py



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