Stack Overflow moderator “animuson”

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2013 07:55:05 +0000, Mats Peterson wrote:

> A moderator who calls himself “animuson” on Stack Overflow doesn’t want
> to face the truth. He has deleted all my postings regarding Python
> regular expression matching being extremely slow compared to Perl.

That's by design. We don't want to make the same mistake as Perl, where 
every problem is solved by a regular expression:

http://neilk.net/blog/2000/06/01/abigails-regex-to-test-for-prime-numbers/

so we deliberately make regexes as slow as possible so that programmers 
will look for a better way to solve their problem. If you check the 
source code for the re engine, you'll find that for certain regexes, it 
busy-waits for anything up to 30 seconds at a time, deliberately wasting 
cycles.

The same with Unicode. We hate French people, you see, and so in an 
effort to drive everyone back to ASCII-only text, Python 3.3 introduces 
some memory optimizations that ensures that Unicode strings work 
correctly and are up to four times smaller than they used to be. You 
should get together with jmfauth, who has discovered our dastardly plot 
and keeps posting benchmarks showing how on carefully contrived micro-
benchmarks using a beta version of Python 3.3, non-ASCII string 
operations can be marginally slower than in 3.2.


> Additionally my account has been suspended for 7 days. Such a dickwad.

I cannot imagine why he would have done that.


-- 
Steven