Hi, My bad, that was a bit of laziness on my part. The reason why my code was silly is not to do with interning though that does happen for strings. Literals, that is numbers and string literals and a few others are loaded as constants. So the cost of constructing them in your code has already been taken care of.
A better example would be something like d = {"a":[1,2,3,4]} print d.setdefault("a", []) Interning is an optimization done to speed up the comparison of strings, by making sure that two string with the same text are represented by the same object. Regards, Sidharth On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Anand Chitipothu <anandol...@gmail.com> wrote: >> What do you mean when you use the word "interned"? > > $ pydoc intern > Help on built-in function intern in module __builtin__: > > intern(...) > intern(string) -> string > > ``Intern'' the given string. This enters the string in the (global) > table of interned strings whose purpose is to speed up dictionary lookups. > Return the string itself or the previously interned string object with the > same value. > _______________________________________________ > BangPypers mailing list > BangPypers@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers > -- I am but a man. _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers