--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/README.txt	Tue Apr 13 10:18:59 2021 -0700
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+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.