Report from the Python Language Summit

Python says that its internal encoding is Unicode, but the nice thing about the enforced mapping to bytes to get it out anywhere else is that good code need not rely on this at all. As long as you always transcode to/from bytes when leaving the Python world, you can *completely ignore* what internal encoding the thing is using (or, rather, use the Unicode stuff like properties etc as needed inside your code, in the happy knowledge that this will not affect transfer to external systems at all, no matter what encoding they use, as long as a codec exists. And writing codecs is *really* not hard, at least not if you don't care much about performance, e.g. for one-off mappings where no codec exists in Python yet :) )