[Python-Dev] len(chr(i)) = 2?

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 2:03 AM, Alexander Belopolsky
<alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> ..
>> *(The first Google hit for "ucs2" is the UTF-16/UCS-2 article on
>> Wikipedia, the first hit for "ucs4" is the UTF-32/UCS-4 article)
>>
>
> Do you think these articles are helpful for someone learning how to
> use chr() and ord() in Python for the first time?

No, that's what the documentation of chr() and ord() is for. For that
use case, it doesn't matter *what* the terms are. They could say "in a
FOO build this will do X, in a BAR build it will do Y, see <link> for
a detailed explanation of the differences between FOO and BAR builds
of Python" and be perfectly adequate for the task. If there is no
appropriate documentation link to point to (probably somewhere in the
C API docs if it isn't anywhere else) then that is a key issue that
needs to be fixed, rather than trying to change the terms that have
been in use for the better part of a decade already.

The raw meaning of UCS2/UCS4 mainly comes into the story when people
are encountering this as a config option when building Python. The
whole idea of changing the terms for the two build types *should* have
been short circuited by the "status quo wins a stalemate" guideline,
but apparently that didn't happen at the time.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia