Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

Jeff Epler jepler at unpythonic.net
Wed Feb 5 09:23:37 EST 2003


On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 12:41:51PM -0800, Scott David Daniels wrote:
> (Talk to Chinese or Japanese programmers
> about how efficient UTF-8 is).

And how do Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic speakers feel about the "efficiency"
of shift-jis or euc-jp?

Surely Europeans have more of a right to complain, since the non-ASCII
chars they use expand from 1 to 2 bytes when going from iso-8859-x to
utf-8 (a 100% expansion), while changing from shift-jis to utf-8
generally means an expansion from 2 to 3 bytes (a 50% expansion).

I think everybody should just suck it up and have a two-character
alphabet.  That would be easiest and most efficient. ("there are 10
kinds of alphabet.  Those with the right number of symbols and those
with too many.")

Jeff





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