New submission from paul rubin <p...@users.sourceforge.net>: Lots of times I want to find the largest element of a list or sequence, defaulting to 0 if the list or sequence is empty. max(seq) throws an exception if seq is empty, so I end up using reduce(max, seq, 0). That is a standard functional programming idiom but can be a bit confusing to imperative-style Python programmers.
max with multiple args is already overloaded to mean the maximum of the args, so I think it would be a good fix to add a keyword arg to accept an optional initial value: max(seq, start=0). For symmetry, min should accept the same arg. The alternatives to using reduce aren't so attractive. If seq happens to be a list, there might be a temptation to conditionalize on len(seq)==0, but that is poor style since it will break if seq later changes to an arbitrary sequence. And trying to test it by calling .next() and saving the value and/or trapping StopIteration gets awfully messy. ---------- components: Library (Lib) messages: 94145 nosy: phr severity: normal status: open title: add "start" arg to max and min functions versions: Python 2.5 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue7153> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
