"tobiah" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wesley chun wrote: >>> "Terry Reedy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> > as a side note, the ints that are cached (for current versions of >>> > Python) are in range(-1, 100)... is this documented somewhere? >>> Not true for at least 2.4 and 2.5. The cached range has expanded
> I don't pretend to understand the reasons for all of this, > but if it is possible to use the same integer object whenever > it is referenced, then why should there be a limit on range? Preallocating all the 4 billion 4-byte ints would overfill the memory of most machines ;-) So there is a tradeoff between startup time, required minimal space usage by *every* program, needed or not, and runtime savings of time and space by programs that do make frequent use of 'small' ints. The expansion from 99 or 100 to 257 is partly a look ahead to a new 'bytes' type for 3.0 and maybe 2.x. > Suppose I fill an list with 100 million random integers in the range > of 1 - 65535. Wouldn't I save much memory if all of the ocurrances > of '12345' pointed to the same integer object? Yes > Why should more be made, > when they all do the same thing, and are not subject to change? Because such a situation is a special case and the delivered code is for everyone. If you compile your own binary, you can change the #define XXX 257 (where XXX is something obvious like MAX_SMALL_INT) in intobject.c to 65535 to make a special-purpose binary for such a use as you describe. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
