[Numpy-discussion] String type again.

[Charles R Harris]

As previous posts have pointed out, Numpy's `S` type is currently treated
as a byte string, which leads to more complicated code in python3. OTOH,
the unicode type is stored as UCS4, which consumes a lot of space,
especially for ascii strings. This note proposes to adapt the currently
existing 'a' type letter, currently aliased to 'S', as a new fixed encoding
dtype. Python 3.3 introduced two one byte internal representations for
unicode strings, ascii and latin1. Ascii has the advantage that it is a
subset of UTF-8, whereas latin1 has a few more symbols. Another possibility
is to just make it an UTF-8 encoding, but I think this would involve more
overhead as Python would need to determine the maximum character size.
These are just preliminary thoughts, comments are welcome.

Chuck
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