RE Module Performance

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2013 01:36:07 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 1:26 AM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 14:36:25 +0100, Jeremy Sanders wrote:
>>> "To conserve memory, Emacs does not hold fixed-length 22-bit numbers
>>> that are codepoints of text characters within buffers and strings.
>>> Rather, Emacs uses a variable-length internal representation of
>>> characters, that stores each character as a sequence of 1 to 5 8-bit
>>> bytes, depending on the magnitude of its codepoint[1]. For example,
>>> any ASCII character takes up only 1 byte, a Latin-1 character takes up
>>> 2 bytes, etc. We call this representation of text multibyte.
>>
>> Well, you've just proven what Vim users have always suspected: Emacs
>> doesn't really exist.
> 
> ... lolwut?


JMF has explained that it is impossible, impossible I say!, to write an 
editor using a flexible string representation. Since Emacs uses such a 
flexible string representation, Emacs is impossible, and therefore Emacs 
doesn't exist.

QED.



-- 
Steven