Copy constructors
gzeljko
gzeljko at sezampro.yu
Mon Aug 13 05:39:44 EDT 2001
From: Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
> I don't know how familiar you are with Python's C-level internals. If
> you are, you'll appreciate the problem if I took a list object and
> changed its type pointer to the dictionary type -- the instance
> lay-out of a dictionary is different, and all the methods would be
> using the list data as if it were dictionary data. Recipe for
> disaster. Likewise, changing a featureless object into a list or dict
> would at the very least require growing the size of the instance; this
> would require a realloc(), which may move the object in memory. But
> if there are other references to the object, these would all have to
> be updated. Python's run-time architecture just doesn't support that.
>
Is pointer indirection here to expensive ?
exuse-me-for-this-kind-of-post-ly-y'rs,
gzeljko
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