Python, Unicode, l8n and i18n

[David LeBlanc]

Hi;

I'd like to propose (or at least enquire when/if) Unicode become the 
default character encoding for Python. By this, I mean that an otherwise 
unadorned string is implicitly Unicode, not ascii as I believe it is now. 
I'll omit all the usual remarks about how great that would be etc.

Has anyone taken a look at using the International Components for Unicode 
with/as part of Python:

"The International Components for Unicode(ICU) is a C and C++ library 
that provides robust and full-featured Unicode support on a wide variety 
of platforms. The library provides:

Calendar support
Character set conversions
Collation (language-sensitive)
Date & time formatting
Locales (170+ supported)
Message catalogs (resources) 
 Message formatting 
Normalization 
Number & currency formatting
Time zones
Transliteration
Word, line & sentence breaks"

http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/icu/project/

It uses the X-Consortium license which I think is 100% compatible with 
the Python License. Seems to add a lot of yummie stuff pretty instantly 
(of course I haven't looked at python's code to say this with even the 
slightest confidence).

Dave LeBlanc