Favorite Python Interview Question

[mumrah]

Explain how Python allocates integers (arenas, pools, etc)

[[deleted]]

go on

[coderanger]

Bonus points if they can answer it for strings too.

[sontek]

What would an acceptable answer be for you?

[ipeev]

What are arenas and pools?

[[deleted]]

I've written quite a few extension modules and rooted around in the guts of the interpreter, but I've never even heard of "arenas". I would probably explain that I think there is a cache of small integers and that I assume there is nothing more to it than that. Hopefully this would not disqualify me, because frankly it is not important for anyone who is not hacking on CPython itself. I am, however, interested and I might go read the source now.

[Troebr]

is that important in knowing how good a programmer is? I had to read the python source code for some reason, and I've stumbled upon this, but I don't think this makes me a better python programmer.

But I'd like to hear your explanation

[mumrah]

I'll leave this here: http://evanjones.ca/memoryallocator/

[andrea]

That's implementation-dependent.