On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 23:35:39 -0700, wxjmfauth wrote: > Py 3.3 succeeded to somehow kill unicode and it has been transformed > into an "American" product for "American" users.
For the first time in Python's history, Python on 32-bit systems handles strings containing Supplementary Multilingual Plane characters correctly, and it does so without doubling or quadrupling the amount of memory every single string takes up. Strings are ubiquitous in Python -- every module, every variable, every function, every class is associated with at least one and often many strings, and they are nearly all ASCII strings. The overhead of using four bytes instead of one for every string is considerable. Python finally has correct unicode handling for characters beyond the BMP, and it does so with more efficient strings that potentially use as little as one quarter of the memory that they otherwise would use, at the cost of a small slowdown in the artificial and unrealistic case that you repeatedly create millions of strings and then just throw them away immediately. Most realistic cases of string handling are unchanged in speed, either trivially faster or trivially slower. The real saving is in memory. According to wxjmfauth, this has "killed" unicode. Judge for yourself his credibility. The best I can determine, he believes this because Americans aren't made to suffer for using mostly ASCII strings. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
