> Are you telling us that you *had* read that doc, > and tripped because it says "depending on the implementation", > when it should say "at the choice of the implementation" ?
no. let's see, where to start ... ? let's say there's a certain property P, for the sake of this loooong discussion, something more or less like a class or type's property of "having immutable values, such that any instance with value X has a single, unique representation in memory and any two instantiations of objects with that value X are in fact references to the same object". Then, for example, python strings have property P whereas python lists do not: >>> x = "test" >>> y = "test" >>> x is y True >>> x = [] >>> y = [] >>> x is y False >>> Now, as it turns out, whether or not python integers have property P _depends_on_their_value_. For small values, they do. For large values they don't. Yes, I understand about the interpreter optimization. I didn't know this, and I find it neither evident nor consistent. I don't think the above post explains this, regardless of how you read "implementation". In fact, the whole string of replies after my initial question reminded me of something I read not too long ago, but didn't quite understand at the time. source : http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/01/a_little_antiantihype.html ''' Pedantry: it's just how things work in the Python world. The status quo is always correct by definition. If you don't like something, you are incorrect. If you want to suggest a change, put in a PEP, Python's equivalent of Java's equally glacial JSR process. The Python FAQ goes to great lengths to rationalize a bunch of broken language features. They're obviously broken if they're frequently asked questions, but rather than 'fessing up and saying "we're planning on fixing this", they rationalize that the rest of the world just isn't thinking about the problem correctly. Every once in a while some broken feature is actually fixed (e.g. lexical scoping), and they say they changed it because people were "confused". Note that Python is never to blame. ''' taking this rant with the proverbial grain of salt, I did think it was funny. Anyway, thanks for all the attempts to show me. I will get it in the end. v. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
