[Python-Dev] Internal representation of strings and Micropython (original) (raw)

Paul Sokolovsky pmiscml at gmail.com
Fri Jun 6 18:25:03 CEST 2014

Hello,

On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 11:59:31 -0400 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

[]

The other problem is that a small slice view of a large object keeps the large object alive, so a view user needs to think carefully about whether to make a copy or create a view, and later to copy views to delete the base object. This is not for beginners.

Yes, so it doesn't make sense to add such feature to any of existing APIs. However, as I pointed in another mail, it would make lot of sense to add iterator-based string API (because if dict methods were switched to iterators, why can't string have them as alternative), and for their return values, it would be ~ natural to return "string views", especially if it's clearly and explicitly described that if user wants to store them, they should be explicitly copied via str(view).

One reason against this would be of course API bloat. But API bloat happens all the time, for example compare this modest proposal http://bugs.python.org/issue21180 with what's going to be actually implemented: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0467/#alternate-constructors .

-- Best regards, Paul mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com

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