Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[François Pinard]

[Gerhard Häring]

> Martin v. Loewis wrote in comp.lang.python:
> > More often, you find the position that Python source code should be
> > restricted to UTF-8, period.

> That's what I'd prefer to see rather sooner than later.

> > The counter-position to that is: what about existing code,

> recode(1)

This is not an acceptable solution.  This is a difficult and recurrent
problem for various languages, and Python is no exception, offering Unicode
support without feeding Unicode fanatism.

The time has not come yet that everybody embraced and uses Unicode on an
individual basis.  French and German still use ISO 8859-1 (or -15), Polish
still use ISO 8859-2, etc.  Guess what, most Americans still use ASCII! [1]

When everybody will be using Unicode, it will be meaningful that Python
supports UTF-8 only.  Python 3.0, Python 4.0 and maybe even Python 5.0 will
be published before the world turns Unicode all over :-).  Let's keep in
mind that Python is there to help programmers at living a better life, today.
Python should take no part in Unicode religious proselytism, and not create
useless programmer suffering by prematurely limiting itself to Unicode-only.

--------------------
[1] Let's be honest, here!  If Unicode was not offering something like
UTF-8 which almost fully supports ASCII without the shadow of a change,
I guess that the average American programmer would vividly oppose Unicode.

Just ponder that slight fuzziness in the way people interpret ASCII
apostrophe compared to Unicode apostrophe: this smallish detail already
generated endless and sometimes heated debates.  (And for those who care,
my position is that whenever fonts and Unicode contradicts in the ASCII
area, fonts should merely be corrected and adapt to both ASCII and Unicode.
The complexity that was recently added in this area is pretty gratuitous,
and is only meant to salvage those who chose to deviate from ASCII.)
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-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard