[Python-Dev] List copy and clear (was Re: Inconsistent API forsets.Set and build-in set) (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Thu Jul 7 16:31:43 CEST 2005

[Tim Peters]

Or my personal favorite,

while mylist: del mylist[::2] Then the original index positions with the most consecutive trailing 1 bits survive the longest, which is important to avoid ZODB cache bugs .

[Christos Georgiou]

This is a joke, hopefully, and in that case, I fell for it. If not, please provide a url with related discussion (for educational purposes :)

Fell for what? It's certainly true that the code snippet allows the original index positions with the most consecutive trailing 1 bits to survive the longest (on the first iteration, all even index positions (no trailing 1 bits) are deleted, and you don't really need a URL to figure out what happens on the i'th iteration). The idea that this is helpful in avoiding anything's "cache bugs" is purely -worthy, though.

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