[XML-SIG] Re: Issues with Unicode type

Uche Ogbuji uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com
Mon, 23 Sep 2002 15:58:11 -0600


> > Can you confirm that this is what RedHat does by default as mentioned
> > Uche and do you know the motivations (and eventually downsides) for this
> > decision?
> 
>   By default Red Hat compiles python with unicode support in UTF-16.
> I'm not in charge of this, I assume it's the default compilation option.

Not from what we found.  Jeremy was the one who encountered this, not me, but 
I'm pretty sure he said he found that starting with RH 7.3, Red Hat started 
building Python 2.x with UTF-32 and whchar_t support.


> IMHO it's a wrong assumption to think that UTF16 is a good cut, because
> you end up with variable lenght encoding anyway, and UCS32 would seriously
> bloat the app I'm afraid.

Just as a side observation: Guido called this FUD.  I'm not so sure.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Apache 2.0 API - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-apache/
Python&XML column: Tour of Python/XML - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/09/18/py.html
Python/Web Services column: xmlrpclib - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-pyth10.html