Pyhon 2.x or 3.x, which is faster?

[Ben Finney]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:14 AM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> > I'm not much interested in Unicode at the minute. I'll pass.
>
> Then *get interested*. Unicode is the only way that you'll ever not be
> parochially bound to a subset of English - or, worse, bound to an
> arbitrary eight-bit codepage that you don't even control the choice
> of, such that your program behaves differently on different systems.

Yes. Any program (and therefore, any programmer) that deals with text in
any way today needs to be Unicode-aware.

This is true whether or not you care about diverse languages. It's no
longer the case that ASCII is enough *even if you arbitrarily limit your
program to English text*.

English text uses non-ASCII characters all the time. Proper punctuation
(e.g. quotation, dashes). Proper spacing (e.g. thin space, no-break
space). Currency symbols (e.g. the Yuan, the Euro, the pound). Official
symbols (e.g. copyright, trademark, degree, section).

If your program fails to preserve these and many other non-ASCII
characters, fails to treat them like any other text, your program does
not handle English-language text.

Many names – of people and places and organisations – cannot be spelled
correctly, even in English, without using non-ASCII characters.

Text was never the same as bytes. Programs hobbled along in the 20th
century making that false assumption, and the problems led to the
creation of Unicode.

Your program will read and write bytes in byte streams (such as files).
They will not write text directly. The only sense in which you can say
that you get text from a file is if you know the text encoding of the
bytes.

This is just a brute fact. You can't have text being anywhere near
bytes, without knowing the text encoding. Guessing is not good enough in
the third millennium.

-- 
 \     “[…] we don’t understand what we mean when we say that [God] is |
  `\    ‘good’, ‘wise’, or ‘intelligent’.” —Karen Armstrong, _The Case |
_o__)                                                   For God_, 2009 |
Ben Finney