hex dump w/ or w/out utf-8 chars

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Ironically, Python has done the same thing for integers for many versions
> too. They just didn't call it "Flexible Integer Representation", but
> that's what it is. For integers smaller than 2**31, they are stored as C
> longs (plus object overhead). For integers larger than 2**31, they are
> promoted to a BigNum implementation that can handle unlimited digits.

Hmm. That's true of Python 2 (mostly - once an operation yields a
long, it never reverts to int, whereas a string will shrink if you
remove the wider characters from it), but not, I think, of Python 3.
The optimization isn't there any more. At least, I did some tinkering
a while ago (on 3.2, I think), so maybe it's been reinstated since. As
of Python 3 and the unification of types, it's definitely possible to
put that in as a pure optimization, anyhow.

ChrisA