On Thu, 22 May 2008, Christian Heimes wrote:
The buffer interface was designed for the slice-as-copy use case:
a = "abcdefg" b = buffer(a, 2, 3) b <read-only buffer for 0x839c2e0, size 3, offset 2 at 0x8391c40> str(b) 'cde' [....]
This answers my musing about shared slices. But it points me at another question: why is buffer() listed in "Non-essential Built-in Functions"? While it is obviously not essential like str() or list(), it isn't deprecated like apply(). On the other hand, some other built-in functions listed under "Built-in Functions" are probably also not essential (I'm not going to go any further out on the limb by giving an example!). Perhaps I misunderstand the intent of this manual page. http://docs.python.org/lib/non-essential-built-in-funcs.html#l2h-88 Isaac Morland CSCF Web Guru DC 2554C, x36650 WWW Software Specialist