addressof object with id()

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:00:07 -0400, Roy Smith wrote:

> In article <mailman.3657.1364085583.2939.python-list at python.org>,
>  Fabian von Romberg <fromberg100 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I have a single questions regarding id() built-in function.
>> 
>> example 1:
>> 
>> var1 = "some string"
>> var2 = "some string"
>> 
>> if use the id() function on both, it returns exactly the same address.
> 
> Yup.

Nope. Did you actually try it?


As far as I know, there is no Python implementation that automatically 
interns strings which are not valid identifiers. "some string" is not a 
valid identifier, due to the space.


[...]
> which is, of course, the result I expected.  Then I tried:
> 
>>>> z = "f" + "oo"
>>>> id(z)
> 3810944
> 
> which actually surprised me.  I had thought interning only affected
> string literals, but apparently it works for all strings!  This works
> too:
> 
>>>> a = "b" + "ar"
>>>> b = "ba" + "r"
>>>> id(a)
> 3810152
>>>> id(b)
> 3810152

You're not actually testing what you think you're testing. In Cpython, 
which I assume you are using, there is a keyhole optimizer that runs when 
code is compiled to byte-code, and it folds some constant expressions 
like `a = "b" + "ar"` to `a = "bar"`. To defeat the keyhole optimizer, 
you need something like this:

a = "bar"
b = "".join(["b", "a", "r"])

although of course a sufficiently smart keyhole optimizer could recognise 
that as a constant as well. This, on the other hand, will defeat it:

b = str("ba") + str("r")

because the keyhole optimizer cannot tell whether str() is still the 
built-in function or has been replaced by something else.


> but, again, none of this is guaranteed.

Correct.



-- 
Steven