Performance of int/long in Python 3

[rusi]

On Mar 31, 5:55 pm, Mark Lawrence <breamore... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

<snipped jmf's broken-record whine>

> I'm feeling very sorry for this horse, it's been flogged so often it's
> down to bare bones.

While I am now joining the camp of those fed up with jmf's whining, I
do wonder if we are shooting the messenger…

>From a recent Roy mysqldb-unicode thread:
> My unicode-fu is a bit weak.  Are we looking at a Python problem, a
> MySQLdb problem, or a problem with the underlying MySQL server?  We've
> certainly inserted utf-8 data before without any problems.  It's
> possible this is the first time we've tried to handle a character
> outside the BMP.
:
:
> OK, that leads to the next question.  Is there anyway I can (in Python
> 2.7) detect when a string is not entirely in the BMP?  If I could find
> all the non-BMP characters, I could replace them with U+FFFD
> (REPLACEMENT CHARACTER) and life would be good (enough).

Steven's:
> But it means that if you're one of the 99.9% of users who mostly use
> characters in the BMP, …

And from http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_astral.html
> The informal name for the supplementary planes of Unicode is "astral planes", since
> (especially in the late '90s) their use seemed to be as remote as
> the theosophical "great beyond". …
> As of this writing for instance, Dreamweaver MX for MacOSX (which I am currently using
> to prepare this) will let you paste BMP text into its WYSIWYG window; but pasting
> Supplementary Plane text there will make it crash.

So I really wonder: Is python losing more by supporting SMP with
performance hit on BMP?
The problem as I see it is that a choice that is sufficiently skew is
no more a straightforward choice. An example will illustrate:

I can choose to drive or not -- a choice.
Statistics tell me that on average there are 3 fatalities every day; I
am very concerned that I could get killed so I choose not to drive.
Which neglects that there are a couple of million safe-drives at the
same time as the '3 fatalities'

[What if anything this has to do with jmf's rants I dont know because
I dont know if anyone (including jmf) knows what he is ranting about. ]