[Python-Dev] PEP 393 Summer of Code Project (original) (raw)

Stefan Behnel stefan_ml at behnel.de
Tue Aug 23 16:02:54 CEST 2011

"Martin v. Löwis", 23.08.2011 15:17:

Has this been considered before? Was there a reason to decide against it? I think we simply didn't consider it. An early version of the PEP used the lower bits for the pointer to encode the kind, in which case it even stopped being a pointer. Modules are not expected to access this pointer except through the macros, so it may not matter that much.

The difference is that you could access them directly in a safe way, if it was a union.

So, for an efficient character loop, replicated for performance reasons or for character range handling reasons or whatever, you could just check the string kind and then jump to the loop implementation that handles that type, without using any further macros.

Stefan

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