[Python-Dev] PEP 332 revival in coordination with pep 349? [ Was:Re: release plan for 2.5 ?]

[Thomas Wouters]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 01:38:41PM -0500, Jim Jewett wrote:
> On 2/14/06, Neil Schemenauer wrote:
> > People could spell it bytes(s.encode('latin-1'))
> 
> Guido wrote:
> > At the cost of an extra copying step.
> 
> I asked:
> > ... why not just add some smarts to the bytes constructor?
> 
> Guido wrote:
> 
> > ... the VM usually keeps an extra reference
> > on the stack so the refcount is never 1. But
> > you can't rely on that
> 
> I did miss this, but _PyString_Resize seems to
> work around it, and I'm not sure that the bytes
> object can't be just as intimate.

No, _PyString_Resize doesn't work around it. _PyString_Resize only works if
the refcount is exactly one: only the caller has a reference. And by
'caller', I mean 'the calling C function'. Besides that, the caller takes
care to only use _PyString_Resize on strings it created itself.
Theoretically it could 'steal' a reference from someplace else, but I
haven't seen _PyString_Resize-using code do that, and it would be a recipe
for disaster.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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