Build problem with unicode and 2.1

[Martin von Loewis]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> > The Py_UNICODE type is required to be a 16-bit long, unsigned int.
> 
> BTW, why is this? In Unicode 3.1 characters have numbers in the range
> U+0000..U+10FFFF.

I think the main reason is that Guido considered it as a waste of
space to use a larger type. Please see Misc/unicode.txt for further
details, it says

# Future implementations can extend the 32 bit restriction to the full
# set of all UTF-16 addressable characters (around 1M characters).

I don't really understand this sentence, but I read it to say "future
implementations might widen Py_UNICODE to 32 bits".

Regards,
Martin