[Cython] test failure for cython-devel in Py2.4

[mark florisson]

On 13 October 2011 12:44, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> mark florisson, 13.10.2011 12:18:
>>
>> On 13 October 2011 10:56, mark florisson wrote:
>>>
>>> On 13 October 2011 10:53, Vitja Makarov wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 2011/10/13 Stefan Behnel:
>>>>>
>>>>> Vitja Makarov, 13.10.2011 08:03:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I found that tempita bug goes away if you change language_level to 2.
>>>>>
>>>>> There's no language level configured in Py2.4, which fails.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> https://sage.math.washington.edu:8091/hudson/job/cython-devel-tests/48/BACKEND=c,PYVERSION=py24/console
>>>>
>>>> No, I mean language level 3 is set at top of the Code.py, when it's
>>>> set to 2 Py2.4 build is okay.
>>>>
>>> Ah, it doesn't take unicode keyword arguments. That should be fixed.
>>
>> Frankly, language level 3 is rather uncomfortable to deal with in
>> python 2(.4).
>
> Well, without the parentheses, I presume ...

Ah, it appears only 2.7 eats unicode keyword arguments. I wonder why
the 2.5 and 2.6 builds didn't fail then.

>
>> Any reason it's set to 3?
>
> Mainly for performance reasons, especially in Python 2. Py3 code tends to
> run faster in Cython due to more explicit semantics. In particular, we get
> unicode content in and write unicode content out, so using unicode literals
> in the source code right away saves a decoding step for each write or
> interpolation of a literal string in Python 2. It won't make a difference
> when running Cython in Python 3, but it saves a lot of unnecessary
> processing cycles in Py2, even though the difference may not be substantial
> over a complete run. It's just so convenient to switch the language level
> and let that shave off a bunch of processing overhead that I didn't see a
> reason not to do it.
>
> I doubt that it'll make a functional difference, though, so if it works
> better without that option, we may have to go back to Py2 compilation.

I see. Yeah it's sort of hard to fix, as I really need bytes in python
2 and really need unicode (str) in python 3, so I can neither write
'foo' nor b'foo' nor u'foo' with language level 3.

BTW this is always a real problem in doctests too, as your bytestrings
will suddenly be printed as b'foo' in python 3, which will fail your
doctest. So to make it work you need to do explicit encoding/decoding
to make it work everywhere.

> Stefan
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