[XML-SIG] Re: [I18n-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] Unicode debate

[Dieter Maurer]

Paul Prescod writes:
 > The fact that my proposal has the same effect as making Latin-1 the
 > "default encoding" is a near-term side effect of the definition of
 > Unicode. My long term proposal is to do away with the concept of 8-bit
 > strings (and thus, conversions from 8-bit to Unicode) altogether. One
 > string to rule them all!
Why must this be a long term proposal?

I would find it quite attractive, when
 * the old string type became an imutable list of bytes
 * automatic conversion between byte lists and unicode strings 
   were performed via user customizable conversion functions
   (a la __import__).

Dieter