

Reexamining Python 3 Text I/O - timf
http://www.dabeaz.com/blog/2010/01/reexamining-python-3-text-io.html

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blasdel
Why didn't they switch to using UTF-8 internally in the 3.0 switch instead of
sticking with the archaic UCS crap?

I'd even give them a pass if their UTF-8 implementation didn't handle
combining characters correctly, since noone else seems to bother!

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rbanffy
Can you explain why this is a problem?

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Silhouette
I suspect what the GP is getting at is that UTF-8 is backward compatible with
ASCII, so if all you're doing is working with 127-bit ASCII text files and you
don't need the additional Unicode support there is minimal overhead.

UCS-2 and other multibyte Unicode representations don't have this useful
property, so even with a simple ASCII file there a significant translation
overhead is going to be required.

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RyanMcGreal
>Due to space constraints

?? Since when does the internet have space constraints?

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ubernostrum
Well, PyCon tutorials (and this is material from one such) are three hours
long. Posting the entirety of one as text would be the mother of all "tl;dr"s.

