[Python-Dev] a suggestion ... Re: PEP 383 (again)

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Curt Hagenlocher wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Thomas Breuel <tmbdev at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Also, what are Jython and IronPython supposed to do on UNIX?  Can they
>> implement these semantics at all?
> 
> IronPython will inherit whatever behavior Mono has implemented. The
> Microsoft CLR defines the native string type as UTF-16 and all of the
> managed APIs for things like file names and environmental variables
> operate on UTF-16 strings -- there simply are no byte string APIs.
> 
> I assume that Mono does the same but I don't have any Mono experience.

Marcin Kowalczyk once did a review, at

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-September/010450.html

It may have changed since then; at the time, Mono would omit
non-decodable files in directory listings, and would refuse to start
if a non-decodable command line argument is passed. The environment
variable MONO_EXTERNAL_ENCODINGS can be set to specify what
encodings should be tried in what order.

However, I don't think it is relevant for the PEP: as Curt says, these
details will be inherited from the VM; the mechanism proposed is really
specific to CPython. To implement it on the other VMs, those would have
to either implement it natively, or provide byte-oriented APIs to allow
Jython/IronPython to implement it on top of it (the latter being not
realistic or useful).

Regards,
Martin