unicode, bytes redux

[John Machin]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "John Machin" <sjmachin at lexicon.net> writes:
> > Actually, what Willie was concerned about was some cockamamie DBMS
> > which required to be fed Unicode, which it encoded as UTF-8,
>
> Yeah, I remember that.
>
> > Tell you what, why don't you and Willie get together and write a PEP?
>
> If enough people care about the problem, I'd say just submit a code
> patch.  I haven't needed it myself, but I haven't (so far) had to deal
> with unicode that often.  It's a reasonably logical thing to want.
> Imagine if the normal length(string) function required copying the
> string around.

Almost as bad: just imagine a language that had a normal strlen(string)
function that required mucking all the way through the string until you
hit some cockamamie in-band can't-happen-elsewhere sentinel.

Cheers,
John