[Python-Dev] len(chr(i)) = 2? (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Nov 22 17:13:39 CET 2010

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 2:03 AM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote: ..

*(The first Google hit for "ucs2" is the UTF-16/UCS-2 article on Wikipedia, the first hit for "ucs4" is the UTF-32/UCS-4 article)

Do you think these articles are helpful for someone learning how to use chr() and ord() in Python for the first time?

No, that's what the documentation of chr() and ord() is for. For that use case, it doesn't matter what the terms are. They could say "in a FOO build this will do X, in a BAR build it will do Y, see for a detailed explanation of the differences between FOO and BAR builds of Python" and be perfectly adequate for the task. If there is no appropriate documentation link to point to (probably somewhere in the C API docs if it isn't anywhere else) then that is a key issue that needs to be fixed, rather than trying to change the terms that have been in use for the better part of a decade already.

The raw meaning of UCS2/UCS4 mainly comes into the story when people are encountering this as a config option when building Python. The whole idea of changing the terms for the two build types should have been short circuited by the "status quo wins a stalemate" guideline, but apparently that didn't happen at the time.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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