[Python-3000] PEP Draft: Enhancing the buffer protcol (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Mar 7 02:08:48 CET 2007

On 2/28/07, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:

Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> wrote: > Josiah Carlson wrote: > >Travis Oliphant <oliphant.travis at ieee.org> wrote: > >>I think you are right. In the discussions for unifying string/unicode I > >>really like the proposals that are leaning toward having a unicode > >>object be an immutable string of either ucs-1, ucs-2, or ucs-4 depending > >>on what is in the string. > > > >Except that its not going to happen. The width of the unicode > >representation is going to be fixed at compile time, generally utf-16 or > >ucs-4. > > Are you sure about this? Guido was still talking about the > multiple-version representation at PyCon a few days ago. I was thinking of Guido's message from August 31, 2006 with the subject of "Re: [Python-3000] UTF-16", in that message he states that he would like it to be a configure (presumably during compilation) option. If he's talking about different runtime representations, then there's an entire thread discussing it with the subject of "How will unicode get used?" in September of 2006, and an earlier thread prior to that. While I was an early proponent of 'represent minimally', I'm not terribly worried about it either way at this point, and was merely attempting to state what had been expressed in the past.

I haven't been following that as closely as perhaps I should have. I'd be glad to drop this and go back to a string representation/implementation that's essentially the 2.x unicode type, with a compile-time configuration choice between 16 or 32 bits wide characters only.

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

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