Using fixed variables probably doesn't help

[Andrew Bennetts]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 08:57:44PM -0500, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
[...]
> But the really interesting thing to me, is that it seems static strings
> are always interned. So we don't need to create a separate object for them.

More specifically, string constants in your code will be interned if they look
like python identifiers:

    >>> x = 'a b'
    >>> y = 'a b'
    >>> id(x), id(y)
    (-1210236576, -1210236608)


> I'm not sure what the exact criteria is, when I tried a really long
> string it would seem that the first time didn't intern the string, but
> the second time would. (The id('longstring') would change twice, and
> then become stable).

The actual check is all_name_chars in Objects/codeobject.c, and it simply checks
that all characters in the string are in the set
"0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".  So a literal
"111" would be interned, even though it's not a valid python identifier.

> Anyway, I'm guessing that we shouldn't spend any time trying to pass
> around object references rather than just using 'file' and 'directory'.
> The only thing we may want to start doing is calling 'intern()' for
> stuff we read from a file.

The main benefit to using variables rather than constants is that static
analysis tools like pychecker have a much better chance of noticing that:

    some_func(kind=consts.dircetory, ...)

has a typo than:

    some_func(kind="dircetory", ...)

-Andrew.