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[Python-Dev] Internal representation of strings and Micropython

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Jun 4 07:17:00 CEST 2014 
On 4 June 2014 11:17, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> My own feeling is that O(1) string indexing operations are a quality of
> implementation issue, not a deal breaker to call it a Python.

If string indexing & iteration is still presented to the user as "an
array of code points", it should still avoid the bugs that plagued
both Python 2 narrow builds and direct use of UTF-8 encoded Py2
strings.

If they don't try to offer C API compatibility, it should be feasible
to do it that way. If they *do* try to offer C API compatibility, they
may have a problem.

> I can't
> see any requirement in the docs that str[n] must take O(1) time, but
> perhaps I have missed something.

There's a general expectation that indexing will be O(1) because all
the builtin containers that support that syntax use it for O(1) lookup
operations.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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