On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 2:09 AM, Random832 <random...@fastmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, May 27, 2016, at 11:53, Rustom Mody wrote: >> And coding systems are VERY political. >> Sure what characters are put in (and not) is political >> But more invisible but equally political is the collating order. >> >> eg No one understands what jmf's gripes are... My guess is that a Euro >> costs 3 times a Dollar. >> >> >>> "€".encode("UTF-8") >> b'\xe2\x82\xac' >> >>> "$".encode("UTF-8") >> b'$' >> >> [Its another matter that this is not the evil deed of python but of >> UTF-8!] > > AIUI jmf's issue is that python's string type (nothing to do with UTF-8) > doesn't treat all strings equally. Strings that are only in Latin-1 > (including your dollar example) have only one byte per character, > whereas strings with BMP characters have two bytes per character (he > also has some more difficult to understand objections to the large fixed > overhead and the cached UTF-8 version [which ASCII strings don't have])
The objection, thus, is "some strings perform faster than others do". The only time that's ever been a serious consideration has been in cryptography, where timing-based attacks can be used to leech info about a private key. But this ain't that. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list