On 9/3/06, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 9/3/06, Jim Jewett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > (2) To what extent will strings have an opaque > > (or at least on-demand) backing store, so that > > decoding/encoding could be delayed? > That seems to be a bit of a leading question. Yes; I (mis-?)read the original question as asking whether non-English users would still be able to use (faster) 8-bit representations. > BTW the term "backing store" is typically used for > *disk-based* storage of large amounts of data -- > but (despite that your first question is about files) > I don't believe this what you're referring to. You are correct; I had forgotten that meaning, and was taking my usage from the CFString (~= NSString) documentation suggested earlier. There it refers to the underlying (private) real storage, rather than to a disk. Today, python unicode characters are limited to a specific fixed width at compile time, because C extensions can operate directly on the data buffer. If C extensions were required to go through the unicode methods -- or at least to explicitly request a buffer -- then the underlying storage could (often) be far more efficient. This privatization would, however, be a major change to the API. Smaller and faster localized strings are one of the compensatory benefits. -jJ _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
