[Python-Dev] Removing Non-Unicode Support? (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Mon Feb 20 14:23:22 CET 2006

Jeff Rush wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 2/19/06, Jeff Rush <jeff at taupro.com> wrote: [Quoting Neal Norwitz]

I've heard of a bunch of people using --disable-unicode. I'm not sure if it's curiosity or if there are really production builds without unicode. Ask this on c.l.p too. Do you know of any embedded platform that doesn't have unicode support as a requirement? Python runs fine on Nokia phones running Symbian, where everything is a Unicode string. 1. PalmOS, at least the last time I was involved with it. Python on a Palm is a very tight fit. 2. "GM862 Cellular Module with Python Interpreter" http://tinyurl.com/jgxz These may be dimishing markets as memory capacity increases and I wouldn't argue adding compile flags for such at this late date, but if the flags are already there, perhaps the slight inconvenience to Python-internal developers is worth it. Hey, perhaps dropping out Unicode support is not a big win - I just know it is useful at times to have a collection of flags to drop out floating point, complex arithmetic, language parsing and such for memory-constrained cases.

These switches make the code less maintainable. I'm not even talking about the testing overhead.

I'd say that the parties interested in non-Unicode versions of Python should maintain these branches of Python. Dito for other stripped down versions.

Note that this does not mean that we should forget about memory consumption issues. It's just that if there's only marginal interest in certain special builds of Python, I don't see the requirement for the Python core developers to maintain them.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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