RE strings (was: Variable Interpolation - status of PEP 215)

[Daniel Dittmar]

>> The implementation could choose to cache the result of re.compile at
>> module level, thus
>> - speeding up the 'naive' re usage
>> - freeing the programmer from doing the caching in code
>
> Any reason the re.match() method could not do the same, internally?

The caching strategies would be different:

using re"...": the compiler would know that there are only x literals in the
module, thus he would store the re.compile results in an array for fast
lookup.

using module re: this requires a dictionary indexed by the patterns. And it
wouldn't be wise to keep all patterns around, so it depends on the locality
of pattern usage how well the cache performs.

Daniel