Can anyone point me at a rationale for PEP 393 being incorporated in Python 3.3 over using UTF-8 as an internal string representation? I've found good articles by Nick Coghlan, Armin Ronacher and others on the matter. What I have not found is discussion of pros and cons of alternatives to the old narrow or wide implementation of Unicode strings.
ISTM that most operations on strings are via iterators and thus agnostic to variable or fixed width encodings. How important is it to be able to get to part of a string with a simple index? Just because old skool strings could be treated as a sequence of characters, is that a reason to shoehorn the subtleties of Unicode into that model? -- Pete Forman -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
