On Sat, Sep 20 2014, Harish Vishwanath wrote:
> Couple of approaches:
>
> - Break the api into two. get_stats and get_stats_consolidated. This way,
> the caller who doesn't know what is your default value of "consolidated"
> argument is will not be confused.
This explodes the API. It's similar to having two sort functions
'sort_increasing', and 'sort_decreasing' instead of just a single sort
function with a flag to indicate ordering.
> - Change the return value to be a list always. Without "consolidated" set,
> it will just be [Stats], else [stat1, stat2, stat3..]
That's what I'd do if it were C. An array. However, in python, when I
know that I'm going to return a list with only one item, I'd prefer to
just return it. Otherwise, there will be stuff like
if consolidated:
stats = stats.pop()
and other such nasties in the code.
> - More descriptive return value could be a dict:
> {
> 'consolidated': True|False
> 'value' : []
> }
That's an option though not one that occurred to me. However, then I'd
have to unpack this dictionary every time I called the function and
optionally, do checking too.
I'm not shooting down your ideas. These are what occurred to me too. I'm
just looking for something "neater".
[...]
--
Cordially,
Noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in
_______________________________________________
BangPypers mailing list
BangPypers@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
