[Python-Dev] constant/enum type in stdlib (original) (raw)

Rob Cliffe rob.cliffe at btinternet.com
Sun Nov 28 02:07:08 CET 2010

On 28/11/2010 21:23, Greg Ewing wrote:

Rob Cliffe wrote:

But couldn't they be presented to the Python programmer as a single type, with the implementation details hidden "under the hood"? Not in CPython, because tuple items are kept in the same block of memory as the object header. Because CPython can't move objects, this means that the size of the tuple must be known when the object is created. But when a frozen list a.k.a. tuple would be created - either directly, or by setting a list's mutable flag to False which would really turn it into a tuple - the size would be known. And since the object would now be immutable, there would be no requirement for its size to change.
(My idea doesn't require additional functionality, just a different API.) Rob Cliffe

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