[Python-Dev] Internal representation of strings and Micropython

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> * Having a build-time option to restrict all strings to ASCII-only.
>
>   (I think what they mean by that is that strings will be like Python 2
>   strings, ASCII-plus-arbitrary-bytes, not actually ASCII.)

What I was actually suggesting along those lines was that the str type
still be notionally a Unicode string, but that any codepoints >127
would either raise an exception or blow an assertion, and all the code
to handle multibyte representations would be compiled out. So there'd
still be a difference between strings of text and streams of bytes,
but all encoding and decoding to/from ASCII-compatible encodings would
just point to the same bytes in RAM.

Risk: Someone would implement that with assertions, then compile with
assertions disabled, test only with ASCII, and have lurking bugs.

ChrisA