Rustom Mody wrote:
2. is — machine representation, too fine to be useful
No, it's *not* machine representation. As I pointed out before, it's part of the abstract semantics of Python. And it's not "too fine to be useful". On the contrary, being aware of which objects are the same and which aren't is vital to writing Python programs that behave in the intended way.
3. graph (or topological) equality
3 captures pythonistas intuition of same better than 1 or 2
I don't think so, see below.
a = [1,2] b = [a,a] c = [[1,2],[1,2]]
p = [1,2] q = [p,p] r = [[1,2],[1,2]]
Now the pythonista understands that b and c may be math-= but have different structure Whereas b is graph-equal to q And c is graph-equal to r However there is no available operation to show/see that distinction
Because usually it's not particularly important to know whether two separate structures have the same topology. On the other hand, it *is* important to know things such as 'b[0] is b[1]' but 'c[0] is not c[1]', because it makes a difference to what happens if you mutate any of those.
The trouble is that graph-isomorphism is NP-complete so the crucial operation cannot be reasonably implemented
We're fortunate that it's not actually a crucial operation, then. :-) -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
