On 23 Jan 2008, at 20:21, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
u"foo" is a hack that will eventually disappear from the various languages that have it or something similar.
I think we need to have binary strings as default with u"…" for a while (whenever that gets merged into the default string type it is probably the real time to break everything without too much regard for backwards compatibility at all — I don't think this time has come yet, though), without any switch to change that.
To note: Python introduced support for Unicode in 2.0 (released 2000), and Unicode strings are the default in 3.0 (as of 2007-12-07 alpha 2) — the current plan is to release 3.0 final in mid-2008; this is eight years between adding Unicode support and it becoming the default — following this precedent would result in Unicode becoming default in PHP at the very earliest of 2016, though I think quite such a long delay in the case of PHP wouldn't be the best for the language, but I doubt we can do it much quicker than around four years (without the benefits outweighing the issues it will cause).
Unfortunately 10 years ago, I wasn't very concerned about that.
10 years ago, not all too many people were with scripting languages, which is part of the reason why (scripting) languages with native Unicode support are only just starting to real take off, as they will, even though we will have Unicode support in PHP 6, have more mature implementations than we will.
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