Flexible string representation, unicode, typography, ...

[Terry Reedy]

On 9/2/2012 3:45 PM, Michael Torrie wrote:

> In the worst case, Python's strings are as slow as Go because Python
> does the exact same thing as Go, but chooses between three encodings
> instead of just one.  Best case scenario, Python's strings could be much
> faster than Go's because indexing through 2 of the 3 encodings is O(1)

In CPython 3.3, indexing of str text string objects is always O(1) and 
it is always indexes and counts code points rather than code units. It 
was the latter for narrow builds in 3.2 and before. As a result, single 
character (code point) strings had a length of 2 rather than 1 for 
extended plane characters. 3.3 corrects this.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy