[Python-Dev] Unicode (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Fri, 26 Apr 2002 12:26:39 -0400

How so? In theory, all the ways you write string constructors today would eventually map to Unicode objects. I'm thinking of string literals and constructor functions. That can be handled with the usual "warn for awhile" mechanism. The array module could be used to manipulate mutable arrays of 8-bit data. While permeating the Python innards with Unicode objects would be a major change I don't see any big syntactic changes - or is that not what worries you?

No syntactic changes, no. But the way we do things would become significantly different. And think of binary I/O vs. textual I/O -- currently, file.read() returns a string. Code dealing with binary files will look significantly different, and old code won't work.

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