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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Jun 4 07:17:00 CEST 2014

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

My own feeling is that O(1) string indexing operations are a quality of implementation issue, not a deal breaker to call it a Python.

If string indexing & iteration is still presented to the user as "an array of code points", it should still avoid the bugs that plagued both Python 2 narrow builds and direct use of UTF-8 encoded Py2 strings.

If they don't try to offer C API compatibility, it should be feasible to do it that way. If they do try to offer C API compatibility, they may have a problem.

I can't see any requirement in the docs that str[n] must take O(1) time, but perhaps I have missed something.

There's a general expectation that indexing will be O(1) because all the builtin containers that support that syntax use it for O(1) lookup operations.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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