id( ) function question

[Tim Chase]

> But if I chose as a value another number (a big one, let say 1e10) I
> get what I will expect also in the case of the chose of the integer 10
> showed above:
>>>> a=1e10
>>>> d=1e10
>>>> d is a
> False
>>>> id(a)
> 11388984
>>>> id(d)
> 11388920

CPython has the option to cache frequently used items, and does 
so for a small range of ints.  It's not guaranteed behavior (or a 
guaranteed range) so you shouldn't rely on it, but it's an 
efficiency thing.  In my current version, it looks like it's ints 
from -5 to 256. YMMV

In general, if you're using "is" (and not comparing with None) or 
id(), you're doing it wrong unless you already know the 
peculiarities of Python's identity implementations.

-tkc