[Python-Dev] Internal representation of strings and Micropython (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Jun 4 04:32:12 CEST 2014

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

* Having a build-time option to restrict all strings to ASCII-only.

(I think what they mean by that is that strings will be like Python 2 strings, ASCII-plus-arbitrary-bytes, not actually ASCII.)

What I was actually suggesting along those lines was that the str type still be notionally a Unicode string, but that any codepoints >127 would either raise an exception or blow an assertion, and all the code to handle multibyte representations would be compiled out. So there'd still be a difference between strings of text and streams of bytes, but all encoding and decoding to/from ASCII-compatible encodings would just point to the same bytes in RAM.

Risk: Someone would implement that with assertions, then compile with assertions disabled, test only with ASCII, and have lurking bugs.

ChrisA

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