"Fredrik Lundh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > you're confusing the external representation of something with the > internal > data model. > > consider this: > > >>> "hello" > >>> 'hello' > >>> "hell\x6f" > >>> "hell\157" > >>> "hell" + "o" > >>> 'h' 'e' 'l' 'l' 'o' > > the above are six ways to write the same string literal in Python.
Minor nit: I believe 'hell' + 'o' is two string literals and a runtime concatenation operation. Perhaps you meant 'hell' 'o', without the '+', which I believe is joined to one literal at parsing or compilation time. > all these result > in a five-character string containing the letters "h", "e", "l", "l", and > "o". > if you type the above at a python prompt, > you'll find that Python echoes the strings back as > 'hello' in all six cases. Nit aside, this is a valuable point that bears repeating. Another example of one internal versus multiple external that confuses many is the following: 1.1 == 1.1000000000000001 # True The mapping of external to internal is many-to-one for both strings and floats and therefore *cannot* be exactly inverted! (Or round-tripped.) So Python has to somehow choose one of the possible external forms that would generate the internal form. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
