[Python-Dev] Disabling string interning for null and single-char causes segfaults (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Mar 4 20:11:54 CET 2013

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Amaury Forgeot d'Arc <amauryfa at gmail.com> wrote:

2013/3/4 Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com>

On 01.03.13 17:24, Stefan Bucur wrote:

Before digging deeper into the issue, I wanted to ask here if there are any implicit assumptions about string identity and interning throughout the interpreter implementation. For instance, are two single-char strings having the same content supposed to be identical objects? I think this is not a bug if the code relies on the fact that an empty string is a singleton. This obviously is an immutable object and there is no public method to create different empty string. Really? x = u'\xe9'.encode('ascii', 'ignore') x == '', x is '' (True, False)

Code that relies on this is incorrect (the language doesn't guarantee interning) but nevertheless given the intention of the implementation, that behavior of encode() is also a bug.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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