[Python-Dev] Divorcing str and unicode (no more implicit conversions).

[Greg Ewing]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Python's slice-and-dice model pretty much ensures that indexing is
> common. Almost everything is ultimately represented as indices: regex
> search results have the index in the API, find()/index() return
> indices, many operations take a start and/or end index.

Maybe the idea of string views should be reconsidered in
light of this. It's been criticised on the grounds that
its use could keep large strings alive longer than needed,
but if operations that currently return indices instead
returned string views, this wouldn't be any more of a
concern than it is now, especially if there is an easy
way to explicitly materialise the view as an independent
string when wanted.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
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