How can you copy (clone) a string?

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <ug0maus4o.fsf at cs.uu.nl>,  <piet at cs.uu.nl> wrote:
>>>>>> aahz at panix.com (Aahz Maruch) (AM) schrijft:
>
>AM> In article <u4s2rwts1.fsf at cs.uu.nl>,  <piet at cs.uu.nl> wrote:
>>> 
>>> i = 0
>>> s = 1000 * 'x'
>>> mem = None
>>> while 1:
>>> i = i+1
>>> mem = (mem, s+`i`)
>
>AM> Blech.  If you're going to do a trick like that, just use a list.
>
>Why? What's wrong with a tuple?

Because it's normally considered immutable, and here you're using it in
a mutable way.  I just don't think it's Pythonic.

>I used the tuple because a list would grow and would temporarily occupy
>double the space while growing. 

That's just as true of what you're doing with the tuple.  But because
most of the storage space is being occupied by the strings, it's lost in
the noise.  Note that my example elsewhere in this thread uses 1MB
strings, so it's even less overhead for the list.
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