Steven Bethard wrote:
>>>>>a = 1, 2, 3
>>>>>b = a[:]
>>>>>a is b
>> True
>
> My impression was that full tuple copies didn't actually copy, but that
> slicing a subset of a
> tuple might. Not exactly sure how to test this, but:
>
> py> a = 1, 2, 3
> py> a[:2] is a[:2]
> False
yup. and to figure out why things are done this way, consider this case:
>>> a = give_me_a_huge_tuple()
>>> len(a)
(a rather large number)
>>> b = a[:2]
>>> del a
(IIRC, I proposed to add "substrings" when I implemented the Unicode string
type, but that idea was rejected, for the very same "and how do you get rid of
the original object" reason)
</F>
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
