Rethinking intern() for python

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Arbash Meinel writes:

 > Going a bit further, I would bet that 90% of all strings are <32kB long.
 > So you could change the ob_size member to be a 'short', and have the
 > upper bit set indicate that there are extra bytes elsewhere to indicate
 > the total length of the string. Or you could have everything but 0xFFFF
 > be valid, and have that value indicate there is a different structure to
 > check.

Dunno if it applies here (our rationale is GC, which compacts small
strings), but in XEmacs instead of having the logic in string, we have
a Lisp_String interface which is implemented internally as small
strings (malloc'd in pools) and big strings (malloc'ed individually).