[Python-Dev] Fighting the theoretical randomness of "is" on immutables

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Antoine,

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> For me, a patch that mandated general-purpose containers (list, dict,
> etc.) respect object identity would be ok.

Thanks, that's also my opinion.

In PyPy's approach, in trying to emulate CPython vs. trying to
convince users that "is" is sometimes a bad idea, we might eventually
end up at the extreme side, which can be seen as where CPython would
be if it cached *all* ints, longs, floats, complexes, strings,
unicodes and tuples.

The original question in this thread was about if it's ok for two
objects x and y to satisfy "x is y" while at the same time "id(x) !=
id(y)".  I think by now that it would only create more confusion (even
if only in some very special cases).  We'll continue to maintain the
invariant then, and if it requires creating extremely large values for
id(), too bad. (1)


A bientôt,

Armin.


(1) the Jython approach of caching the id's is not applicable here:
the objects whose id are hard to get are precisely those that don't
have a long-living representation as object in memory.  You can't
cache an id with a key that is, say, a double-word "long" --- if this
double-word is not an object, but merely a value, it can't be used as
key in a weakdict.  You don't have a way of knowing when you can
remove it from the cache.