[I18n-sig] Unicode surrogates: just say no!

[Machin, John]

> Unfortunately, the surrogate-creating behavior of \U
> is present in 2.0 and 2.1, so I
> think we can't reasonably remove this from narrow Python 2.2, and I
> like the rule that unichr and \U match.  But maybe that's the one that
> should go, and unichr() and ord() should deal with single code points
> only.

My understanding is that very few people noticed that \U was creating
surrogate pairs, and my guess would be that nobody would be affected in
practice by stopping this behaviour.

IOW, I suggest treating "\U -> surrogate pairs" just like the more
esoteric parts of xrange() -- or the "Korean mess" in earlier Unicode --
just bury it and move on.

IMO, the type of people wanting to fiddle with surrogate pairs
in narrow Python would also be capable of whipping up a C extension
to unpack a narrow Unicode string into a list of ints and do the shifting
and masking necessary with surrogates. If this is not so, then the next
preference
would be for "someone" to write such a C extension and publicise it. I
would volunteer to be that "someone" in the interests of not
burdening ord() with "magic". 


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