[Python-Dev] Support byte string API of Windows in Python3? (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Apr 19 13:07:05 CEST 2010

Victor Stinner <victor.stinner haypocalc.com> writes:

It's a choice, I didn't want to patch Windows because I know that Windows use unicode internally. I consider that developers using Python3 should use unicode on Windows, and byte or unicode+surrogates on other OS.

I think both possibilities should be available on all OSes, so as to make it easier to write cross-platform code. Having to switch being bytes and unicode depending on the OS means developers will have to deal with encoding issues themselves, which is suboptimal from a language usability's point of view.

Regards

Antoine.

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