diff README.txt @ 28:a1cda4ff6d4b

Add README.
author David Barts <n5jrn@me.com>
date Tue, 13 Apr 2021 10:18:59 -0700
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+This was written because I got sick of text I entered in many
+applications having ugly "straight quotes" instead of the more
+attractive “curly” quotes. I found it needlessly awkward to type the
+Unicode characters necessary to do that, and it was easy enough to code
+up a state machine that took care of most of the common cases one
+encounters in English language texts.
+
+While doing so, I also got the itch to experiment with using the Python
+array module and the buffer protocol to implement writable strings,
+because I was curious as to how much a fairly straightforward attempt at
+same might speed up code (such as the state machine I had just written)
+that makes many tiny, single-character modifications to a long strong.
+It turns out that it is *very* hard to improve on Python's own strings,
+but I left my own code in because its performance isn't all *that*
+awful, either.