Compile Python 3 interpreter to force 2-byte unicode

[nospam.nospam.Terry Reedy]

On 11/25/2017 5:12 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 26, 2017 at 9:05 AM,  <wojtek.mula at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi, my goal is to obtain an interpreter that internally
>> uses UCS-2. Such a simple code should print 65535:
>>
>>    import sys
>>    print sys.maxunicode
>>
>> This is enabled in Windows, but I want the same in Linux.
>> What options have I pass to the configure script?

You must be trying to compile 2.7.  There may be Linux distributions that
compile this way.  If you want to use, or ever encounter, non-BMP chars, using
surrogate pairs is problematical.  By my reading of the official UCS-2 docs,
Python's old 16-bit unicode implementation is not fully compliant.  Others have
 claimed that is it not a UCS-2 implementation.

> Why do you want to? What useful value do you have in creating this
> buggy interpreter?

> Ever since Python 3.3, that has simply not been an
> option. The bug has been solved.

If you want to seriously work with unicode, many recommend using modern Python.

--
Terry Jan Reedy