[I18n-sig] Re: [Python-Dev] Unicode debate (original) (raw)

Just van Rossum just@letterror.com
Wed, 3 May 2000 12:41:27 +0100

At 10:15 AM +0200 03-05-2000, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Huh ? The pure fact that you can have two (or more) Unicode characters to represent a single character makes Unicode itself have the same problems as e.g. UTF-8.

It's the different level of abstraction that makes it different.

Even if "e" is _equivalent_ to the combined character, that doesn't mean that it _is_ the combined character, on the level of abstraction we are talking about: it's still 2 characters, and those can be sliced apart without a problem. Slicing utf-8 doesn't work because it yields invalid strings, slicing "e" does work since both halves are valid strings. The fact that "e`" is semantically equivalent to the combined character doesn't change that.

Just