May 22, 2008
3:35 p.m.
Facundo Batista wrote:
Hi!
A thread in PyAr raised the question that, considering that strings are immutable, why a slice of a string is a copy and not a reference to a part of that string.
I couldn't answer why, so I'm asking here...Is it because the reference counting will be complicated? Is it because it'd be inefficient in other way? It's something else? Or is something that could be done... but is not done yet?
Thank you very much!
In fact, a slice is *not* always a copy! In at least some (simple) cases, a slice references the original string:
s = 'abc' t = s[:] s is t True id(s) 3081872000L id(t) 3081872000L
Gary Herron