An oddity in list comparison and element assignment

[Slawomir Nowaczyk]

On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:03:00 -0700
aleax at mac.com (Alex Martelli) wrote:

#> Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
#> 
#> > Depends what one means by 'copy'.  See below for your alternate wording.
#> 
#> Please give me a reasonable definition of the unadorned word "copy"
#> which would make this statement false.  (And, just to forestall one
#> possible attempt: no, I cannot agree that a ``deepcopy'' is a reasonable
#> definition of the _unadorned_ word "copy").

Actually, when *I* think about the word "copy", I have in mind what
happens with files... and I to me semantics of []*3 is more like
symbolic linking, not copying. While I, personally, understand the
sentence in question "The result of S*n or n*S is the concatenation of
n copies of S" correctly, I *do* see how it might be misunderstood by
others.

Not that I know how to express it better :-(

-- 
 Best wishes,
   Slawomir Nowaczyk
     ( Slawomir.Nowaczyk at cs.lth.se )

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good
special effects -- Roger Zelazny