On re / regex replacement

[jmfauth]

There is actually a discussion on the dev-list about the replacement
of "re" by "regex".

I'm not a regular expressions specialist, neither a regex user.
However, there is in regex a point that is a little bit disturbing
me.

The regex module proposes a flag to select the "coding" (wrong word,
just to be short):

The global flags are: ASCII, LOCALE, NEW, REVERSE, UNICODE.

If I can undestand the ASCII flag, ASCII being the "lingua franca" of
almost all codings, I am more skeptical about the LOCALE/UNICODE
flags.

There is in my mind some kind of conflict here. What is 100% unicode
compliant shoud be locale independent ("Unicode.org") and a locale
depedency means a loss of unicode compliance.

I'm fearing some potential problems here:  Users or modules working
in one mode, while some others are working in the other mode.

Nothing technical here. It seems to me nobody has pointed this
fact.

jmf