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28
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1 This was written because I got sick of text I entered in many
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2 applications having ugly "straight quotes" instead of the more
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3 attractive “curly” quotes. I found it needlessly awkward to type the
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4 Unicode characters necessary to do that, and it was easy enough to code
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5 up a state machine that took care of most of the common cases one
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6 encounters in English language texts.
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7
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8 While doing so, I also got the itch to experiment with using the Python
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9 array module and the buffer protocol to implement writable strings,
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10 because I was curious as to how much a fairly straightforward attempt at
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11 same might speed up code (such as the state machine I had just written)
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12 that makes many tiny, single-character modifications to a long strong.
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13 It turns out that it is *very* hard to improve on Python's own strings,
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14 but I left my own code in because its performance isn't all *that*
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15 awful, either.
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