string issue

[Alex Martelli]

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.

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?


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.

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


Alex