Thomas Bellman wrote: > Fixed-with characters *do* have advantages, even in the external > representation. With fixed-with characters you don't have to > parse the entire file or stream in order to read the Nth character; > instead you can skip or seek to an octet position that can be > calculated directly from N.
OTOH, encodings that are free of null bytes and ASCII compatible also have advantages. > And not the least, UTF-32 is *beautiful* compared to UTF-16. But ugly compared to UTF-8. Not only does it have the null byte and the ASCII incompatibility problem, but it also has the endianness problem. So for exchanging Unicode between systems, I can see no reason to use anything but UTF-8 (unless, of course, one end, or the protocol, already dictates a different encoding). Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
