interning

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of intern.

   She is interning at a law firm while she finishes her degree.

   Interning abroad broadened her professional network considerably.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty: participle in continuous tenses (they are interning) and gerund standing as a noun (interning abroad helped her). The construction tells you which verb you have. Interning prisoners or foreign soldiers takes a direct object and means confinement. Interning at a firm takes none and means trainee work. The same spelling also names the programming practice.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The practice of always using a shared reference to each value instead of making separate copies of objects that are equal.

   Like a single master copy that everyone consults, rather than printing the same document fresh for each person.

   Python applies interning to small integers so that equal values share the same object.

   Interning reduced the application's memory footprint by eliminating duplicate string objects.

   Note

   A programmer's word for keeping one canonical copy of each distinct value and handing out references to it. Equal values, identical strings above all, then share a single instance. Duplicates stop costing memory, and two values can be compared by checking whether they are the same object. The idea is one copy per value, not one copy per use.

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