[Python-Dev] Unicode

[Guido van Rossum]

> How so?  In theory, all the ways you write string constructors today
> would eventually map to Unicode objects.  I'm thinking of string
> literals and constructor functions.  That can be handled with the
> usual "warn for awhile" mechanism.  The array module could be used
> to manipulate mutable arrays of 8-bit data.  While permeating the
> Python innards with Unicode objects would be a major change I don't
> see any big syntactic changes - or is that not what worries you?

No syntactic changes, no.  But the way we do things would become
significantly different.  And think of binary I/O vs. textual I/O --
currently, file.read() returns a string.  Code dealing with binary
files will look significantly different, and old code won't work.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)