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New Features in Python 1.6

François Pinard pinard at iro.umontreal.ca
Tue Apr 4 15:22:52 EDT 2000 
"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:

> ' = 1 byte/char, " = 2 bytes/ char is more straightforward.

It would be much more logical, indeed.

Of course, we known that ASCII is ideally 7/8 of an apostrophe, but we
could use a whole apostrophe as an acceptable compromise.  For Unicode,
which is internally represented as UCS-2, a double quote is very natural.

When Python will later be adapted to process UCS-4 internally, we could use
quadruple apostrophes, conveniently represented by two double quotes, like
in ""This is an UCS-4 string"".  We could also use '''', "'', '"' and ''"
to discriminate between the four usual kind of endianness and byte swapping.

P.S. - Sorry! :-)  Just letting some of the steam out...  Back to work! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
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