Py 3.3, unicode / upper()

[Westley Martínez]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 09:54:20PM -0500, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 12/19/2012 9:03 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> >On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> From what I've been able to discern, [jmf's] actual complaint about PEP
> >>393 stems from misguided moral concerns.  With PEP-393, strings that
> >>can be fully represented in Latin-1 can be stored in half the space
> >>(ignoring fixed overhead) compared to strings containing at least one
> >>non-Latin-1 character.  jmf thinks this optimization is unfair to
> >>non-English users and immoral; he wants Latin-1 strings to be treated
> >>exactly like non-Latin-1 strings (I don't think he actually cares
> >>about non-BMP strings at all; if narrow-build Unicode is good enough
> >>for him, then it must be good enough for everybody).
> >
> >Not entirely; most of his complaints are based on performance (speed
> >and/or memory) of 3.3 compared to a narrow build of 3.2, using silly
> >edge cases to prove how much worse 3.3 is, while utterly ignoring the
> >fact that, in those self-same edge cases, 3.2 is buggy.
> 
> And the fact that stringbench.py is overall about as fast with 3.3
> as with 3.2 *on the same Windows 7 machine* (which uses narrow build
> in 3.2), and that unicode operations are not far from bytes
> operations when the same thing can be done with both.
> 
> -- 
> Terry Jan Reedy

Really, why should we be so obsessed with speed anyways?  Isn't
improving the language and fixing bugs far more important?