[Dev] Interationalization Schema Update

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:28 AM 7/20/2005 -0700, Andi Vajda wrote:
>Of course, the type check could happen at set time, at the cost of 
>performance. It's a trade-off I made a long time ago and that could 
>certainly be revisited. I could also add a 'debug' mode that enforces type 
>upon setting.

I suppose it would improve performance if an attribute is repeatedly set to 
different values before a commit.  But it would be interesting to know how 
often that occurs along a performance-critical path.  It seems to me that 
most data-intensive tasks that actually *change* item attributes are import 
and synchronization tasks (downloading mail, sharing, etc.) which are 
highly unlikely to modify a given item's value attributes more than once.

So, it may be that if "eager" typechecking were just done for value 
attributes, it would have no net performance impact in practice, because 
only one check would be occurring whether it's done at assignment time or 
commit time.