[Python-Dev] please consider changing --enable-unicode default to ucs4 (original) (raw)

Neil Hodgson nyamatongwe at gmail.com
Thu Oct 8 00:55:35 CEST 2009

Ronald Oussoren:

Both Carbon and the modern APIs use UTF-16.

If Unicode size standardization is seen as sufficiently beneficial then UTF-16 would be more widely applicable than UTF-32. Unix mostly uses 8-bit APIs which are either explicitly UTF-8 (such as GTK+) or can accept UTF-8 when the locale is set to UTF-8. They don't accept UTF-32. It is possible that Unix could move towards UTF-32 but that hasn't been the case up to now and with both OS X and Windows being UTF-16, it is more likely that UTF-16 APIs will become more popular on Unix.

Neil

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list