Sybren Stuvel wrote: > Bryan Olson enlightened us with: > >>I recently wrote a module supporting value-shared slicing. > > Maybe I'm dumb, but could you explain this concept? Why would someone > whant this?
My original motivation was reduce the amount of copying in some tools that parse nested structures. All I really needed at the time was a reference to a string, and the start and stop values. Once I adopted Python's sequence interface, I thought I might as well implement it consistently, generally, and completely. So the first reason someone might want this is for efficiency, in space and/or time. The second reason is more abstract. Python's slice assignment is a useful feature, but the slice selection must appear on the right-hand-side of assignment. VSlice lets one instantiate the updatable slice as an object, and pass it around. I looked into supporting slice assignment between slices of different sizes when possible, but the various options I came up with all sucked. -- --Bryan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
