> Further, is there much processing required to do the magic? When python > do introspective magic, is it memory intensive? by that I mean does it > have to make copies of the objects to do the look-ups?
A Python interpreter never copies *objects* (as opposed to references to objects) except when you ask it too. (This sometimes trips up newbies when the copied reference is to an uncopied mutable object that they thought was copied.) For CPython, references are 4 (possibly 8) byte pointers, which is smaller than any object. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
