[Python-Dev] Python 3000: Special type for object attributes & map keys

[Guido van Rossum]

Without an implementation and supporting profile data nobody is going
to believe that you can do name lookup faster than with the built-in
dict type in CPython. Note that names seen by the parser are already
interned, so most of what you seem to be proposing is already
implemented...

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:27 PM, Henrik Vendelbo <hvendelbo.dev at gmail.com> wrote:
> It appears to me that if you can make mapping mechanisms faster in
>  Python you can make significant
>  overall speed improvements. I also think the proposed concept could
>  add flexibility to persistence formats
>  and RMI interfaces.
>
>  My basic idea is to have a constant string type with an interpreter
>  globally unique hash. If the original constant
>  is created in a manner different from string constants, it can be
>  tracked and handled differently by the interpreter.
>
>  Obviously most object attribute references are done with the dot
>  operator, so I guess the interpreter already has
>  an efficient mapping mechanism. But there must be a crossover with
>  __getattr__ etc, where a map of some sort is
>  used. I imagine that having a global namespace to translate attribute
>  names into integers could be used for several
>  purposes by the interpreter as well as an application exchanging
>  objects with other applications.
>
>  I imagine these expressions to be supported:
>  * attrname(string) - creates an attrname value from the string
>  * int(attrname) - gets the hash value
>  * string(attrname) - gets the string value
>
>  Hope this makes sense
>
>  Henrik
>
>  P.S. I originally thought of this in a JavaScript context so forgive
>  me if this would make little difference in Python.
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)