[Python-Dev] Slice as a copy... by design? (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri May 23 00:35:19 CEST 2008


Facundo Batista wrote:

A thread in PyAr raised the question that, considering that strings are immutable, why a slice of a string is a copy and not a reference to a part of that string.

Because it would make it too easy to accidentally keep a large string alive via a reference to a small part of it.

Some way of explicitly requesting a view into another string might be desirable, but it shouldn't be the default behaviour for string slicing.

-- Greg



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