[Pythonmac-SIG] cross-platform puzzle

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 21, 2005, at 10:29 PM, Charles Hartman wrote:

> On Feb 21, 2005, at 9:15 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> Note that strings are immutable in Python, and if "Dict" has strings 
>> for values then the copy-by-slice is extraneous.  There's no reason 
>> to make a copy of an object that can't possibly be changed.  I'm 
>> pretty sure that slicing a string like that is going to return the 
>> same object anyway.
>
> The value (not the key) is a list of strings. The strings are 
> immutable, but (if I understand rightly) the list is not. Without the 
> slice-copy, when I later replace one of the strings *in* the list, the 
> dictionary's own list gets changed.

Yeah, that's correct.  I had misread the part of your post that said 
the values were lists.

-bob