Per Hedbor () @ Pike (-) developers forum wrote:
The same is true of the lexer, by the way, there does not really _need_ to be three versions, simply use normal string indexing code. It's not _that_ slow, and generally speaking you do not spend most of your time compiling, optimizing that case specifically to this extent seems rather excessive.
Yes, quite.
However, I still can't entirely shake the notion that we're overdoing it here. Maybe we could simply make the preprocessor and compiler grok UTF8 directly and get rid of the special casing. All compiler input processing would return back to 8-bit only. And if someone would be as audacious to keep unicode pike source files on disk, then a quick unicode -> utf8 preprocessor would do the trick quite nicely.