Guido van Rossum <guido <at> python.org> writes: > On 5/1/06, Talin <talin <at> acm.org> wrote: > > Given that strings are going to be unicode, will there be a "characters" > > data type to go along with the "bytes" data type? > > No. I'm not sure what you mean by "characters" but the only characters > that Python will support are Unicode characters. Python's 'str' and > 'bytes' will be like String and byte[] in Java. But there won't be a > separate "char" type to represent the elements of 'str' -- like > before, a 1-char string will server nicely to represent a "character". > And a byte is represented by a Python int -- there won't be a separate > int-ish type constrained to range(0, 256).
It appears that my question has been misunderstood by everyone; I'll try to phrase it better: The short version is: will there be a mutable character array type? (which I am calling "characters"?) First, I do use array, not a lot but I do use it occasionally. One common use case is equivalent to the Java StringBuffer class - that is, a means for building up strings a character at a time, which otherwise would be expensive to do with immutable strings. Now, from the discussion of "bytes" I get the impression that it, too, is a mutable type (someone said 'like list'). So given that 'characters' (i.e. unicode characters) are now distinct from 'bytes', it makes sense to me to declare a mutable character array. And to me, the most natural name for such a type is 'characters', although I suppose you could also call it "stringbuffer" or something. BTW, is the internal encoding of unicode strings UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2, or UTF-32? Just wondering... -- Talin _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
