[Python-Dev] OT: Unicode history (was Alternative Impl. for PEP 292)

[alloydflanagan at comcast.net]

[François Pinard]
>>Many people consider that Unicode, or UTF-8 at least, is strongly
>>favouring English (boldly American) over any other script or language.
>>If it has not been so, Americans would never have promoted it so much,
>>and would have rather shown an infinite and eternal reluctance...
To be fair to the developers of Unicode, I'd suggest that the issue is not favoring (note spelling! :) ) English, but rather keeping compatibility with an enormous amount of existing data which was encoded in ASCII.  Which was an English standard, but you can only do so much in 7 bits...
As for American reluctance, how are you going to convince anyone to double (at least) the storage requirements for their data, to support languages they never use?  That would have cost a great deal of money.
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