[Python-Dev] UTF-16 code point comparison

[Fredrik Lundh]

bill wrote:
> Heh. Now you're being silly. Supporting UTF-16 isn't that difficult. =
You
> always know whether the character is a low surrogate or a high =
surrogate.

sorry, but you're being silly.  using variable-width encoding for
interal storage is difficult, slow, and just plain stupid on modern
hardware.

(image processing people stopped doing stupid things like that
ages ago, and trust me -- a typical image contains many more
pixels than a typical text ;-)

after all, if variable-width internal storage had been easy to deal
with, we could have used UTF-8 from the start...  (and just like
the Tcl folks, we would have ended up rewriting the whole thing
in the next release ;-)

</F>