[I18n-sig] Unicode strings: an alternative

[Walter Dörwald]

Andy Robinson wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for this support of my ASCII proposal.
> >
> > --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
> 
> I missed most of the discussion due to a business trip.

And I'm new to the discussion! ;)

> I'll just say that I am very happy with ASCII as the default.

It's better than UTF-8, but 8bit Unicode would be better, because
it's the least suprising alternative.

People who use Python with "funny" languages, are already used to
converting their strings around, and they treat their Python
strings as byte arrays anyway. With Python 1.6 they can start
to switch to Pythons unicode strings without any problems.
That isn't so with UTF-8. I wonder how it will work with ASCII.
Will this ASCII restriction only be enforced when converting
to Unicode, or will the string type itself be restricted to
ASCII?

IMHO the long term goal should be to have only one string type
(being Unicode) and one byte array type (being our current string 
type?)

Bye,
	Walter Dörwald