On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > I thought Terry Reedy had shot down any claims about performance overhead, > and that the memory savings in many cases must be substantial and therefore > worthwhile. Or have I misread something? Or what?
My reading of the thread(s) is/are that there are two reasons for the debate to continue to rage: 1) Comparisons with a "narrow build" in which most characters take two bytes but there are one or two characters that get encoded with surrogates. The new system will allocate four bytes per character for the whole string. 2) Arguments on the basis of huge strings that represent _all the data_ that your program's working with, forgetting that there are numerous strings all through everything that are ASCII-only. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list