Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Bridging strings from Python to other languages

[Bill B. <bb...@co...>]

That makes a lot of sense.

In general, I would like to see Python move in the direction of 
supporting <character buffers> in an analagous/interchangeable fashion 
with <string>.   This would make integration with external tools a lot 
easier.

A part of that is doing exactly what you have indicated below -- when a 
string must be constant and there is a question as to whether or not 
the backing store for the string is mutable, provide a mechanism via 
which an immutable copy can be created.

Nice.

b.bum

On Wednesday, Feb 5, 2003, at 17:34 US/Eastern, Just van Rossum wrote:
> Just van Rossum wrote:
>
>> Python doesn't do anything special to "inbound" keys, it simply barfs
>> when the key isn't hashable.
>
> Here's an idea: we could propose a new protocol for dicts that would
> work like this:
>
>   def __setitem__(self, key, value):
>       if not hashable(key):
>           if hasattr(key, "__immutablecopy__"):
>               key = key.__immutablecopy__()
>           else:
>               raise TypeError, "unhashable key"
>       ...insert value with key into dict...
>
> This might actually solve our problem nicely. Soonest for 2.3, though,
> and even then we need to hurry.
>
> Just