Can I rely on...

[Terry Reedy]

Emanuele D'Arrigo wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I just had a bit of a shiver for something I'm doing often in my code
> but that might be based on a wrong assumption on my part. Take the
> following code:
> 
> pattern = "aPattern"
> 
> compiledPatterns = [ ]
> compiledPatterns.append(re.compile(pattern))
> 
> if(re.compile(pattern) in compiledPatterns):

Note that for this generally take time proportional to the length of the 
list.  And as MRAB said, drop the parens.

>     print("The compiled pattern is stored.")
> 
> As you can see I'm effectively assuming that every time re.compile()
> is called with the same input pattern it will return the exact same
> object rather than a second, identical, object. In interactive tests
> via python shell this seems to be the case but... can I rely on it -
> always- being the case? Or is it one of those implementation-specific
> issues?

As MRAB indicated, this only works because the CPython re module itself 
has a cache so you do not have to make one. It is, however, limited to 
100 or so since programs that use patterns repeatedly generally use a 
limited number of patterns.  Caches usually use a dict so that 
cache[input] == output and lookup is O(1).

> And what about any other function or class/method? Is there a way to
> discriminate between methods and functions that when invoked twice
> with the same arguments will return the same object and those that in
> the same circumstances will return two identical objects?

In general, a function that calculates and return an object will return 
a new object.  The exceptions are exceptions.

> 
> If the answer is no, am I right to state the in the case portrayed
> above the only way to be safe is to use the following code instead?
> 
> for item in compiledPatterns:
>    if(item.pattern == pattern):

Yes.  Unless you are comparing against None (or True or False in Py3) or 
specifically know otherwise, you probably want '==' rather than 'is'.

Terry Jan Reedy