Removing Non-Unicode Support?

[Jeff Rush]

Neal Norwitz wrote:
> On 2/17/06, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> 
>>Neal Norwitz wrote:
> >
>>Another candidate for removal is the --disable-unicode
>>switch.
>>
>>We should probably add a deprecation warning for that in
>>Py 2.5 and then remove the hundreds of
>>#idef Py_USING_UNICODE
>>from the source code in time for Py 2.6.
> 
> I've heard of a bunch of people using --disable-unicode.  I'm not sure
> if it's curiosity or if there are really production builds without
> unicode.  Ask this on c.l.p too.

Such a switch quite likely is useful to those creating Python interpreters 
for small hand-held devices, where space is at a premium.  I would hesitate 
to remove switches to drop features in general, for that reason.

Although I have played with reducing the footprint of Python, I am not 
currently doing so.  I could never get the footprint down sufficiently to 
make it usable, unfortunately.  But I would like to see the Python 
developers maintain an awareness of memory consumption and not assume that 
Python is always run on modern fully-loaded desktops.  We are seeing 
increasing use of Python in embedded systems these days.

-Jeff