Help on sys.getrefcount

[Christoph Becker-Freyseng]

Hello,

I wrote the following test-program:

import sys
l= ['x', 'y', 'z', 'a']
for iR in l:
    refD= sys.getrefcount(iR)
    print str(iR) + '::' + str(refD)

It's output is:
x::7
y::7
z::7
a::8


I expected the output to be:
x::3
y::3
z::3
a::3


I don't see why the refcount is so high (7 or 8 instead 3).
What's even more strange to me is: Why is the refcount for 'a' higher 
than for e.g. 'x'?
This also is the fact when the order of the list is changed:

import sys
l= ['x', 'y', 'a', 'z']
for iR in l:
    refD= sys.getrefcount(iR)
    print str(iR) + '::' + str(refD)

Output:
x::7
y::7
a::8
z::7


This happens with Python 2.0 on SuSE Linux 7.3 with 2.218 Kernel.



Many Thanks,
   Christoph Becker-Freyseng