Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > (Fifteen years. It's seventeen years since Unicode 2.0, when 16-bit > characters were outmoded. It's about time _every_ modern language > followed Python's and Pike's lead and got its Unicode support right.)
Most languages that already have some support for Unicode have a significant amount of legacy code to continue supporting, though. Python has the same problem: there're still heaps of Python 2 deployments out there, and more being installed every day, none of which do Unicode right. To fix Unicode support in Python, the developers and community had to initiate – and is still working through – a long, high-effort transition across a backward-incompatible change in order to get the community to Python 3, which finally does Unicode right. Other language communities will likely have to do a similar huge effort, or forever live with nearly-right-but-fundamentally-broken Unicode support. See, for example, the enormous number of ECMAScript deployments in every user-facing browser, all with the false assumption (§2 of ECMA-262 <URL:http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm>) that UTF-16 and Unicode are the same thing and nothing outside the BMP exists. And ECMAScript is near the front of the programming language pack in terms of Unicode support — most others have far more heinous flaws that need to be fixed by breaking backward compatibility. I wish their communities luck. -- \ “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may | `\ hear from others twice as much as we speak.” —Epictetus, | _o__) _Fragments_ | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
