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

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Jun 4 08:51:12 CEST 2014

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

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.

It would. The downsides of a UTF-8 representation would be slower iteration and much slower (O(N)) indexing/slicing.

ChrisA

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