2) a table with characters that are reasonably valuable
and cover 99% of all programming, communication and typography in latin script
I think it's called latin-1
And I think you've mentioned numpy - there was a discussion a while back about having a one-byte-per-character string type (the existing ones are 4 byte unicode and kinda-sort-py2-string/bytes dtype)
perhaps you might want to revive that conversation.
-CHB
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Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer
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