Sathyaish wrote: >> But what's got that to do with it? Strings are very mutable in C. > > I realized after posting that I'd said something incorrect again. The > concept of "mutability" itself is a high-level concept compared to C. > Memory allocation for strings is expensive because of the way malloc() > works to find a "best-fit" against a "first-fit" in traditional memory > management systems. Because of the performance hit, high level > languages and frameworks, such as the Common Type System of the .NET > Framework for example, considers strings as immutable. That, unlike > Python, doesn't however, make them impossible to modify in-place. >
I believe part of the reason for their immutability is so that they can be used as dictionary keys, which is a very common use. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
