[Python-3000] Lazy strings (was Re: Py3k release schedule worries)

[Josiah Carlson]

"Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On 12/30/06, Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:
> > Maybe this would be a good time to review, or at least restate, the
> > specific plans for strings in Py3K? I know that there's been a great
> > deal of discussion on this, but a lot of that discussion took place
> > *before* Larry's work (specifically, before a number of people in this
> > group drank the lazy-strings KoolAid.)
> 
> The *only* think that I care about is that we end up with a single
> string type named 'str' that has the same semantics (and some of the
> same performance) as the current Unicode strings. (I mention
> performance because s[i] should remain an O(1) operation.)

If I understood the lazy string stuff, this requirement more or less
kills them (at least with the rope-based implementation that I last paid
attention to), unless we consider ammortization arguments.

It also seems to kill any attempts to make the underlying representation
always ucs-2, with surrogate pairs working the way they were intended 
(pairs are seen as one character, not two), as the algorithm/structure
involved got O(log n) performance for s[i] on strings with surrogate
pairs, O(1) otherwise.


This does not, however, preclude the construction of a wrapper type that
implements lazy strings, views, etc., or its packaging as a 3rd party
module for Python 2.x and/or 3.x .

 - Josiah