DN595900999

Subject: Unicode patches checked in - DN [1]

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> - 10 Mar 2000 - comp.lang.python

 I've just checked in a massive patch from Marc-Andre Lemburg which
 adds Unicode support to Python.  This work was financially supported
 by Hewlett-Packard.  Marc-Andre has done a tremendous amount of work,
 for which I cannot thank him enough.

 We're still awaiting some more things: Marc-Andre gave me
 documentation patches which will be reviewed by Fred Drake before they
 are checked in; Fredrik Lundh has developed a new regular expression
 which is Unicode-aware and which should be checked in real soon now.
 Also, the documentation is probably incomplete and will be updated,
 and of course there may be bugs -- this should be considered alpha
 software.  However, I believe it is quite good already, otherwise I
 wouldn't have checked it in!

 I'd like to invite everyone with an interest in Unicode or Python 1.6
 to check out this new Unicode-aware Python, so that we can ensure a
 robust code base by the time Python 1.6 is released (planned release
 date: June 1, 2000).  The download links are below.

 Links:

 http://www.python.org/download/cvs.html
     Instructions on how to get access to the CVS version.
     (David Ascher is making nightly tarballs of the CVS version
     available at http://starship.python.net/crew/da/pythondists/)

 http://starship.python.net/crew/lemburg/unicode-proposal.txt
     The latest version of the specification on which the Marc
     has based his implementation.

 http://www.python.org/sigs/i18n-sig/
     Home page of the i18n-sig (Internationalization SIG), which has
     lots of other links about this and related issues.

 http://www.python.org/search/search_bugs.html
     The Python Bugs List.  Use this for all bug reports.

 Note that next Tuesday I'm going on a 10-day trip, with limited time
 to read email and no time to solve problems.  The usual crowd will
 take care of urgent updates.  See you at the Intel Computing Continuum
 Conference in San Francisco or at the Python Track at Software
 Development 2000 in San Jose!

 --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)