Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[François Pinard]

[Mark Jackson]

> [...] if you feel so strongly about this that you are prepared to write
> code that would, in fact, be unusable outside your own locale: whyever
> do you think the larger community should undertake the task of enabling
> you to do this?

The larger community is indeed made up of many communities, which all
have an advantage at seeing themselves served for what they locally are.
This how the internationalisation effort builds up.  A software designer
might need a great deal of effort for separately supporting one version
per national characterisation, but when the effort is made common and
reusable for many nations, it becomes more efficient and more worthy.

It is unlikely that the development mainstream for Python supports English
and Vietnamese only, say.  As things stand, it is more likely that Python
supports, all at once, those languages reached by Unicode, or encodable
in and out of Unicode.  So, the development effort is rewarded by serving
a much wider user base.

About being "unusable outside your own locale", that is precisely the point.
Many, many people live their lives within their locale, and have no interest
nor reason for producing software to be used outside it.  When you program
for the planet, English is likely to be your best choice.  When you program
for yourself, or in closed chops, English does not have to impose itself.

Python aims the whole planet, but it is not meant only for those who also
aim the whole planet.  I understood early that Python is for everybody.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard