[Python-Dev] Re: Re: Alternative Implementation for PEP292:SimpleString Substitutions

[Fredrik Lundh]

Terry Reedy wrote:

>> usually shorter in languages with many ideographs (my non-scientific
>> tests indicate that chinese text uses about 4 times less symbols than
>> english; I'm sure someone can dig up better figures).
>
> This is why I am not especially enamored of Unicode and the prospect of Python becoming married to 
> it.  It is heavily weighted in favor of efficiently representing Chinese and inefficiently 
> representing English.

Don't confuse Unicode with its UCS-2 and UCS-4 encodings.  On a conceptual
level, good old 7-bit ASCII and 8-bit ISO-Latin-1 are both Unicode.

</F>