[Python-Dev] copy() and deepcopy()

[Raymond Hettinger]

[Aahz]
> Thing is, it *is* possible to have a mutable and hashable object.  The
> hashable part needs to be immutable, but not the rest.  Consider dicts
in > the generic sense: the key needs to be immutable, but the value
need not, > and it certainly can be useful to combine key/value into a
single object.

> Now, I'm still not sure that your analysis is wrong, but I wanted to
be
> very, very clear that hashability is not the same thing as
immutability.


[Guido]
> For frozensets, shallow copy should return self; for sets, shallow
> copy should return set(self).
> 
> In both cases, deepcopy() should do something like _deepcopy_list()
> and _deepcopy_tuple(), respectively.  That is, deepcopying a set is
> pretty straightforward, but must store self in the memo first, so that
> (circular!) references to self are correctly deepcopied.  Deepcopying
> a frozenset will be a little harder, because there can still be
> circular references!  _deepcopy_tuple() shows how to do it.

Thanks guys.  It's all clear now.

The good news is that nothing special has to be done to implement
deepcopying.  The copy.deepcopy() function is already smart enough to do
the right thing when the type provides a __reduce__() method for
pickling.


Raymond