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

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Fri Jun 6 17:14:30 CEST 2014

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 8:15 PM, Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:

I'm sorry if I was somehow related to that, my bringing in the formal language spec was more a rhetorical figure, a response to people claiming O(1) requirement.

This was exactly why this whole discussion came up, though. We were debating on the uPy bug tracker about how important O(1) indexing is; I then came to python-list to try to get some solid data from which to debate; and then the discussion jumped here to python-dev for more solid explanations. The spec wasn't perfectly clear, and now it's being made clearer: O(N) indexing does not violate Python's spec, ergo uPy is allowed to use UTF-8 as its internal representation, as long as script-visible behaviour is correct. It'll be interesting to see when it's done (I'm currently working on that implementation, bit by bit) and to run the CPython benchmarks on it.

It's been a fruitful and interesting discussion, and the formal language spec is key to it. No need to apologize!

ChrisA

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