[Python-Dev] UCS2/UCS4 default (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jul 2 19:08:01 CEST 2008

I think we should continue to leave this up to the distribution. AFAIK many Linux distros already use UCS4 for everything anyway.

The alternative (no matter what the configure flag is called) is UTF-16, not UCS-2 though: there is support for surrogate pairs in various places, including the \U escape and the UTF-8 codec.

I don't want to rule out UTF-16 as internal representation from the Python language spec, because JVM- and .NET-based implementations pretty much have no choice in the matter if they want to be compatible with the native string type (which is very important for performance and compatibility with other languages on those platforms).

For that reason I think it's also better that the configure script continues to default to UTF-16 -- this will give the UTF-16 support code the necessary exercise. (It is mostly a superset of the UCS-4 support code, so I'm less worried about the latter getting enough exercise.)

--Guido

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai at in-nomine.org> wrote:

Guido (and others of course), back in 2001 you pointed out that you wanted to move to UCS4 completely as the ideal situation (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/i18n-sig/2001-June/001107.html) over the current default UCS2. Given 3.0 will use Unicode strings as the default, would it also not make sense to make the switch at this point as well? The current situation with UCS2 is particularly bad now that the CJK ideographs Extension B. has been produced (and C is under ballot and D is under development). Personally I use nothing else but UCS4 compiled Python binaries for the past years. See also http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0261/ for background for the 2001 options. -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B Expansion of happiness is the purpose of life...

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-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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