[Python-3000] Making more effective use of slice objects in Py3k (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Aug 31 01:59:07 CEST 2006

Josiah Carlson wrote:

Up until this morning I was planning on writing everything such that constructive manipulation (upper(), add, etc.) returned views of strings.

I was about to say that this would be completely pointless, when I realised the point is so that further operations on these results would return views of them. In Josiah's views-always-return-views world, that would actually make sense -- but only if we really wanted such a world.

To my mind, the use of views is to temporarily call out a part of a string for the purpose of applying some other operation to it. Views will therefore be short-lived objects that you won't want to keep and pass around. I suspect that, if views are the default result of anything done to a view, one will almost always be doing a str() on the result to turn it back into a non-view. If that's the case, then returning views would be the wrong default.

-- Greg

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