[Python-Dev] Slice as a copy... by design?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2008, Facundo Batista wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Someone did a patch for this at one point, but I don't remember what
> happened.

I rejected it because I came up with a worst-case scenario where the
behavior with the patch in place was much, much worse than the
behavior without it -- improved performance in other scenarios
notwithstanding.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)