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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2016 07:07 am, Chris Angelico wrote:

> You _need_ [emphasis in original] to make sure
> that you're thinking about text as text, and that means being aware of
> RTL vs LTR, combining characters, case conversions, collations, etc,
> etc, etc, all in terms of Unicode rather than as eight-bit or
> seven-bit characters.

And I thought that I was a Unicode-evangelist...

You don't "need" to do anything of the sort, any more than (say) Firefox
needs to support displaying Scitex CT image files.

If you want to put people off Unicode and make them even more resistant, the
idea that there is no middle ground between "naive ASCII" and full,
complete, total and utterly 100% coverage of the entire Unicode standard
will do it nicely. Unicode covers a huge amount of ground, and most users
won't need more than a fraction of it. Especially people like Bart, who are
writing code for his own personal use.

If Bart gets to the point of being able to correctly read and write his
mostly ASCII text as UTF-8 files without moji-bake, that's probably more
than he'll personally ever need. Or not. Only he will tell.

> An intelligent Unicode-aware MUD client has to 
> not only cope with variable width 

That may be true, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still room in the
world for dumb, just-barely Unicode capable clients. And frankly I would
rather partial Unicode support than buggy Unicode support: I have a text
editor which would be my preferred editor of choice except it has an
annoying bug where it will (seemingly at random) switch to Right-To-Left
mode for no reason, and then be impossible to switch back. Since I have
*no* use for RTL, I would rather an editor that doesn't support that than
one that supports it buggily.



-- 
Steven