skip@pobox.com wrote:
As a Python programmer I'd get back what look like three strings: "http", ":", and "//www.python.org/". If each of them was a view onto part of the original string, only the last one would truly refer to a NUL-terminated sequence of characters. If I then wanted to see what scheme's value compared to, the string's comparison method would have to recognize that it wasn't truly NUL-terminated, copy it, call strncmp() or whatever underlying routine is used for string comparisons. (Maybe string comparisons are done inline. I'm sure there are some examples where the underlying C string routines are called.)
Python strings are character buffers with a known length, not null-terminated C strings. the CPython implementation guarantees that the character buffer has a trailing NULL character, but that's mostly to make it easy to pass Python strings directly to traditional C API:s. (string views are nothing new in Python. the original Unicode string implementation supported this, but that was partially removed during integration. the type still uses a separate buffer to hold the characters, though (unlike 8-bit strings that store the characters in the string object itself)) </F>