On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Ron Adam wrote: > Simon Brunning wrote: > >> On 8/14/05, Martijn Brouwer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> I can imagine that *a lot* of libs/scripts use the copy library, >> >> I think that copy is very rarely used. I don't think I've ever imported it. > > I use copy.deepcopy() sometimes, and more often [:] with lists. > Dictionary objects have a copy method. All non mutable objects are > copies.
When you say [:], do you mean that you copy lists like this: l = someList() m = [] m[:] = l ? That's what i've been doing. The other day, i realised that i could just do: l = someList() m = list(l) The same works for copying dicts. Whilst it's still not utterly obvious that what this is about is making a copy, it's more obvious, cleaner, shorter and probably faster than the slice assignment, which is really kludgy (almost intercalorific, in fact - or even perlish!). > I too have wondered why copy isn't a builtin, Same here. It seems like a sort of obvious thing to have, and could probably implemented much more simply and quickly in the interpreter. You'd probably want a __copy__ hook for classes which want special handling, and just do a normal deep copy for everything else. tom -- Orange paint menace -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
