On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 2:10 AM, Random832 <random...@fastmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 20, 2017, at 01:15, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> I haven't really been paying attention to Marko's suggestion in detail, >> but if we're talking about a whole new data type, how about a list of >> nodes, where each node's data is a decomposed string object guaranteed to >> be either: > > How about each node but the last has a fixed "length" (say, 16 > characters), and random access below that size is done by indexing to > the node level and then walking forward. > > I've thought about this in the past for encoding strings in UTF-8 with > O(1) random code point access.
You would have to benchmark it thoroughly. Don't forget that allocating a large string would now require a number of memory allocations (which are slow), and that cache locality is a huge source of hidden performance variation. Big O is far from the whole story. "But it's happening in constant time!" is meaningless if the constant is too high. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
