[Python-Dev] Unicode patches checked in (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Fri, 10 Mar 2000 19:20:01 -0500

I've just checked in a massive patch from Marc-Andre Lemburg which adds Unicode support to Python. This work was financially supported by Hewlett-Packard. Marc-Andre has done a tremendous amount of work, for which I cannot thank him enough.

We're still awaiting some more things: Marc-Andre gave me documentation patches which will be reviewed by Fred Drake before they are checked in; Fredrik Lundh has developed a new regular expression which is Unicode-aware and which should be checked in real soon now. Also, the documentation is probably incomplete and will be updated, and of course there may be bugs -- this should be considered alpha software. However, I believe it is quite good already, otherwise I wouldn't have checked it in!

I'd like to invite everyone with an interest in Unicode or Python 1.6 to check out this new Unicode-aware Python, so that we can ensure a robust code base by the time Python 1.6 is released (planned release date: June 1, 2000). The download links are below.

Links:

http://www.python.org/download/cvs.html Instructions on how to get access to the CVS version. (David Ascher is making nightly tarballs of the CVS version available at http://starship.python.net/crew/da/pythondists/)

http://starship.python.net/crew/lemburg/unicode-proposal.txt The latest version of the specification on which the Marc has based his implementation.

http://www.python.org/sigs/i18n-sig/ Home page of the i18n-sig (Internationalization SIG), which has lots of other links about this and related issues.

http://www.python.org/search/search_bugs.html The Python Bugs List. Use this for all bug reports.

Note that next Tuesday I'm going on a 10-day trip, with limited time to read email and no time to solve problems. The usual crowd will take care of urgent updates. See you at the Intel Computing Continuum Conference in San Francisco or at the Python Track at Software Development 2000 in San Jose!

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