bearophile: > In Python 3 strings are all unicode, integral numbers are all > multiprecision, chars in Python 2.x+ are strings, lists are arrays > that can grow dynamically, and so on because the Purpose of Python > isn't to be as fast as possible, but to be first of all flexible, > safe, easy, not but-prone, even if other solution or older versions > were faster.
I have missed another example: It may be possible to create a sorting routine that's not stable but is faster than the current stable timsort (for example in C++ STL you have both sorting routines, and the unstable one is a variant of introsort that is faster than the stable version). I think Python will keep the stable one, because even if (in theory. In practice it may be quite difficult to write such unstable sorter faster than timsort) it can be slower, it's safer and more useful than an unstable sort. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
