Jarkko Hietaniemi writes:
<standing ovations from Helsinki> In-band data always spells
out as unnecessary contortion. First of all, it always means
extra parsing, escape characters, escaped escaped characters, ...
Not if we have an infinite number of bits per char. Then the only
parsing you need is the "width" of each char. If it is 0, it is a
*unit* of metadata. No escapes, no nothing.
Secondly, extra code means extra space for bugs to germinate.
Supporting metadata in the core means that this extra space for bugs
is quite small, comparing to all the users inventing their own little
conspiracies.
Thirdly, extra code cannot do any good to execution speed.
Why? With a lexical pragma to enable it? There is only a handful of
opcodes which are going to be affected. Witness utf8 patch, it was
quite small.
Ilya
