On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 11:21 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
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> On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Aldcroft, Thomas <aldcroft@head.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> BTW -- maybe we should keep the pathological use-case in mind: really short strings. I think we are all thinking in terms of longer strings, maybe a name field, where you might assign 32 bytes or so -- then someone has an accented character in their name, and then ge30 or 31 characters -- no big deal.
>>
>>
>> I wouldn't call it a pathological use case, it doesn't seem so uncommon to have large datasets of short strings.
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> It's pathological for using a variable-length encoding.

>> I personally deal with a database of hundreds of billions of 2 to 5 character ASCII strings. This has been a significant blocker to Python 3 adoption in my world.

>
> I agree -- it is a VERY common case for scientific data sets. But a one-byte-per-char encoding would handle it nicely, or UCS-4 if you want Unicode. The wasted space is not that big a deal with short strings...

Unless if you have hundreds of billions of them.

>> BTW, for those new to the list or with a short memory, this topic has been discussed fairly extensively at least 3 times before. Hopefully the *fourth* time will be the charm!
>
> yes, let's hope so!
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> The big difference now is that Julian seems to be committed to actually making it happen!
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> Thanks Julian!
>
> Which brings up a good point -- if you need us to stop the damn bike-shedding so you can get it done -- say so.
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> I have strong opinions, but would still rather see any of the ideas on the table implemented than nothing.

FWIW, I prefer nothing to just adding a special case for latin-1. Solve the HDF5 problem (i.e. fixed-length UTF-8 strings) or leave it be until someone else is willing to solve that problem. I don't think we're at the bikeshedding stage yet; we're still disagreeing about fundamental requirements.

--
Robert Kern