[Python-Dev] Re: Alternative Implementation for PEP292:SimpleStringSubstitutions

[Fredrik Lundh]

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

> There seems to be a strong "just live with it" argument but no
> advantages are offered other than it matching your personal approach to
> text handling.  Why force it when you don't have to.  At least three of
> your users (me, Aahz, and Fred) do not want unicode output when we have
> str inputs.

one of which wrote the original unicode implementation, and the mixed-type
regular expression engine used to implement templates, and a very popular
XML library that successfully uses mixed-type text to handle text faster and
using less memory than all other Python XML libraries.

I've shown over and over again that Unicode-aware text handling in Python
doesn't have to be slow and bloated; I'd prefer if we kept it that way.

</F>