[Python-Dev] enum discussion: can someone please summarize open issues?

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Apr 29 08:40:16 CEST 2013


Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On 29/04/13 10:29, Ethan Furman wrote:
> 
>>    - bool(1)    # True
>>    - int('11')  # 11
>>    - str(var)   # whatever var had in it, now as a str
> 
> I think that's a red herring, because you're comparing the use of the 
> object constructor with look-up by name.

How does what bool() is doing differ from a lookup?
It's not constructing a new instance. Neither is
int() in the cases where the argument is in the
range of values that it caches.

More generally, the built-in types can be thought
of as coercion functions -- they take an argument
and return some related value from the type's
repertoire. Whether they do that by constructing
a new object or not is an implementation detail.

-- 
Greg


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