It seems there's no reason to document these functions which operate on null-terminated unicode arrays.

If they aren't public, they should get an underscore.

All our API functions are either public or private; all public ones should be documented.

> It seems there's no reason to document these functions
> which operate on null-terminated unicode arrays.

It's the easiest way to create a new string with the new Unicode API, when it's difficult to predict the exact output length and maximum character:

Py_UCS4 *buffer = PyMem_Malloc(...);
...
str = PyUnicode_FromKindAndBuffer(buffer, PyUnicode_4BYTE_KIND);
PyMem_Free(buffer);

PyUCS4_* functions are useful in the "..." (to write characters, expecially when you manipulate multiple strings).

For examples, see Python/import.c which used char*, then Py_UNICODE* and now Py_UCS4*. It's maybe possible to avoid functions like xxx_strlen(), but it was easier to replace str*() functions by Py_UNICODE_* and then PyUCS4_* functions.

--

Py_UNICODE_* and PyUCS4_* functions are not part of the stable API.

Before the release, we should consider whether we can drop these functions altogether.

Making sure we don't forget that :)

New changeset 80a7ab9ac29f by Martin v. Löwis in branch 'default':
Drop Py_UCS4_ functions. Closes #13246.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/80a7ab9ac29f