On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Fri, 26 Jul 2013 01:36:07 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 1:26 AM, Steven D'Aprano >> <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >>> On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 14:36:25 +0100, Jeremy Sanders wrote: >>>> "To conserve memory, Emacs does not hold fixed-length 22-bit numbers >>>> that are codepoints of text characters within buffers and strings. >>>> Rather, Emacs uses a variable-length internal representation of >>>> characters, that stores each character as a sequence of 1 to 5 8-bit >>>> bytes, depending on the magnitude of its codepoint[1]. For example, >>>> any ASCII character takes up only 1 byte, a Latin-1 character takes up >>>> 2 bytes, etc. We call this representation of text multibyte. >>> >>> Well, you've just proven what Vim users have always suspected: Emacs >>> doesn't really exist. >> >> ... lolwut? > > > JMF has explained that it is impossible, impossible I say!, to write an > editor using a flexible string representation. Since Emacs uses such a > flexible string representation, Emacs is impossible, and therefore Emacs > doesn't exist. > > QED.
Except that the described representation used by Emacs is a variant of UTF-8, not an FSR. It doesn't have three different possible encodings for the letter 'a' depending on what other characters happen to be in the string. As I understand it, jfm would be perfectly happy if Python used UTF-8 (or presumably the Emacs variant) as its internal string representation. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
