Grant Edwards wrote:
On 2004-12-23, Steven Bethard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ah, my mistake, I missed the [:] after the source argument
that was taking a copy... which brings up the question, how
many other people would miss it?
Too many. This is why I greatly prefer
list(lst)
To me, that's just as non-obvious. I would have guessed that
calling list() on a list was a noop. I would be wrong.
Surprised, but wrong.
It makes a lot more sense when you remind yourself that list() et al are not conversion functions, but rather class constructors. (This is complicated by the fact that in old Pythons, int() and float() *were* conversion functions... but are not so any more.)
Given a user-defined class, I think it wouldn't be any surprise to see that
class Spam:
# [....]s1 = Spam( ... ) s2 = Spam(s1)
results in two (probably almost identical) instances of Spam. Using list() to create a copy of a list is analogous, but we're used to thinking of list() as a converter rather than a constructor...
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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