Shrinky-dink Python (also, non-Unicode Python build is broken)

[Neil Hodgson]

Larry Hastings:

> As for future development of Windows-specific Python features...
> doesn't that generally happen in modules, rather than the Python
> interpreter, these days?  Either in Mark Hammond's pywin32 (what used
> to be called "win32all"), or perhaps done in Python using ctypes.
> There haven't been any changes to the three Windows-specific modules
> (msvcrt, winreg, and winsound) mentioned in any "What's New in Python
> 2.x" document, and 2.0 came out more than five years ago.

    It is in the built-in modules providing OS features that there 
should be more use of Unicode. Unicode system calls are more accurate 
and have fewer limitations than ANSI system calls. Examples are allowing 
Unicode in sys.argv and os.environ or for file paths where the ANSI 
versions are limited to less than 260 characters.

    Are you willing to monitor and fix new Py_USING_UNICODE issues or 
are you proposing just to produce a patch now and then expect 
contributors to maintain this feature?

    Neil