[pypy-dev] RPython unicode support design question

[Amaury Forgeot d'Arc]

Carl Friedrich Bolz wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Maciek is working on adding unicode support for RPython and him and me
> were discussing some of the design issues. One of the questions we had
> is how mixing of strings and unicode should work in RPython.
>
> My proposal is the following: forbid _all_ mixing of strings and unicode
> in RPython. Mixing of strings and unicode would result in a SomeObject
> (e.g. "hello" + u"world" wouldn't be allowed). The only way to turn a
> byte string into a unicode object would be to use the encode and decode
>   methods and I guess in the beginning the only allowed encoding would
> be "ascii" (we can think about supporting other encodings later, or
> leave it to something in pypy/rlib).
>
> This has many advantages, it forces the programmer to cleanly separate
> between unicode and byte strings and it makes some part of the
> implementation less messy.

+1. Python3.0 takes the same direction, and RPython is supposed to be
a subset of CPython.

-- 
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc