string issue

[Reinhold Birkenfeld]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> Reinhold Birkenfeld <reinhold-birkenfeld-nospam at wolke7.net> wrote:
> 
>> Alex Martelli wrote:
>> 
>> > So, *WHAT ON EARTH* could possibly
>> > make this weird 'x[:]' form preferable to 'x*1'?!  It's MUCH more
>> > obvious that the second one returns an independent, separate object
>> > initially equal to x
>> 
>> .>> x = 2
>> .>> y = x*1
>> .>> x is y
>> True
>> .>>
>> 
>> just-kidding-ly yours,
> 
> You're just snipping a crucial side-observation which I had put in
> exactly to avert such irrelevant diversions:
>
>> whenever it
>> matters -- i.e., whenever x is mutable.
> 
> Immutable types are allowed to collapse any two equal but "distinct"
> objects into one identity -- that's always the case, I acknowledged that
> in my sentence which I just quoted and which you had failed to quote
> again, and I don't see what's funny in this procedure and the time it's
> wasting, for me and for every reader of this group, now and in the
> future from archives.

Well, I overread your side-observation (can happen if you don't have too
much time and are not accustomed to flying over English text) and,
though I sensed that it was bad, posted my little joke.

> I'm sure that by selectively quoting just some of your words and
> artfully omitting others I could ``make" you say, not just slightly
> imprecise things, but utter and total idiocies.  So?  What's the point
> of this "kidding"?  Next time, why don't you just omit, for example, a
> "not", when you quote me, so as to make it appear that I was saying
> exactly the reverse of what I was obviously saying?

Well, snipping single paragraphs is different from snipping words out of
them.

Sorry. Didn't mean to drive you insane -- your posts are of use, so clpy
(include me) need you in the future.

> I guess it must be time for me to go away from this group again, if my
> time on it is to me spent repeating over and over all sorts of asides
> which people "just kidding" carefully avoid quoting from my posts,
> apparently in order to make believe they caught me in anything less than
> perfect accuracy.  Cheez -- I HAVE been guilty of less than perfect
> accuracy in the past (even of outright errors), but not THIS time (if
> one has the common decency to look at ALL the words I posted, rather
> than a careful selection thereof), so I completely fail to see how you
> thought this "kidding" could be fun.

This is the hot Italian temper, I suppose ;) Of course you were right,
and I'm glad to see your posts of today.

> OK, I'm off.  Have a nice life.

Thanks, I'll do.

Reinhold