On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 8:25 AM, Victor Stinner <[email protected]> wrote: > Not only, many libraries expect use bytes arguments encoded to a specific > encoding (eg. locale encoding). Said differenlty, only few libraries written > in > C accept wchar* strings. > > The Linux kernel (or many, or all, UNIX/BSD kernels) only manipulate byte > strings. The libc only accept wide characters for a few operations. I don't > know how to open a file with an unicode path with the Linux libc: you have to > encode it... > > Alexander: you should first patch all UNIX/BSD kernels to use unicode > everywhere, then patch all libc implementations, and then all libraries > (written in C). After that, you can have a break.
Slightly less ambitious is to get them all to agree to standardise on UTF-8 as the encoding mechanism (which is actually in the process of happening, it just has a long way to go). However, as a glue language, it is part of Python's role to help manage the transition from legacy encodings to UTF-8, so it will be a very long time before the idea of removing support for the encoding argument becomes even remotely feasible. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | [email protected] | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
