atoi(strchr(s, '-') + 1) What does this do? Finds the first instance of a -, and converts the remainder of a string to an int. 0 allocations, 0 copies. Doing t

atoi(strchr(s, '-') + 1) What does this do? Finds the first instance of a -, and converts the remainder of a string to an int. 0 allocations, 0 copies. Doing this with 0 copies is pretty much impossible in Python, and probably in ruby and Javascript too. </quote> The copying could be avoided in non-idiomatic Python: int(buffer(s, s.find("-") + 1))