On Sat, Mar 21, 2020 at 12:15:21PM -0400, Eric V. Smith wrote:
On 3/21/2020 11:20 AM, Ned Batchelder wrote:
Why be so prescriptive? The semantics of these functions should be about what the resulting string contains. Leave it to implementors to decide when it is OK to return self or not.
I agree with Ned -- whether the string object is returned unchanged or a copy is an implementation decision, not a language decision. [Eric]
The only reason I can think of is to enable the test above: did a suffix/prefix removal take place? That seems like a useful thing.
We don't make this guarantee about string identity for any other string method, and CPython's behaviour varies from method to method: py> s = 'a b c' py> s is s.strip() True py> s is s.lower() False and version to version: py> s is s.replace('a', 'a') # 2.7 False py> s is s.replace('a', 'a') # 3.5 True I've never seen anyone relying on this behaviour, and I don't expect these new methods will change that. Thinking that `is` is another way of writing `==`, yes, I see that frequently. But relying on object identity to see whether a new string was created by a method, no. If you want to know whether a prefix/suffix was removed, there's a more reliable way than identity and a cheaper way than O(N) equality. Just compare the length of the string before and after. If the lengths are the same, nothing was removed. -- Steven