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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Jun 6 02:51:11 CEST 2014

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

(1) I asked if it would be okay for MicroPython to optionally use nominally Unicode strings limited to ASCII. Pretty much the only response to this as been Guido saying "That would be a pretty lousy option",

It would be limiting to have this as the only way of dealing with unicode, but I don't see anything wrong with having this available as an option for applications that truly don't need anything more than ascii. There must be plenty of those; the controller that runs my car engine, for example, doesn't exchange text with the outside world at all.

The rationale of internal UTF-8 is that the use of any other encoding internally will be inefficient since those strings will need to be transcoded to UTF-8 before they can be written or printed,

No, I think the rationale is that UTF-8 is likely to use less memory than UTF-16 or UTF-32.

-- Greg

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