[IronPython] Re: IronPython 0.7.4 released

[Jim Hugunin]

Nick Jacobson wrote:
> What are nstr and zip2?

Two little hacks that I wrote a long time ago while playing around with
different implementation and performance ideas.  They don't belong in
__builtins__ any more and will be removed.  In case you're curious:

nstr is an ascii string type that I was experimenting with to see how
well two different kinds of strings would work in IronPython vs.
everything being a Unicode System.String.  This design didn't work very
well, but I forgot to remove this reference from __builtins__.  There's
still a chance that this will be revisited before IronPython 1.0;
however, I'm pretty committed to using the single CLS string type if at
all possible.

zip2 is a version of the zip function specialized for the most common
case of two arguments.  It should be a private implementation detail.  I
exposed it when looking at benchmarks to see if there were any
noticeable performance benefits to get from calling it directly.

Time to do some more house cleaning - Jim