Paul Boddie wrote: > On 10 Apr, 15:57, Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> The point I am trying to make is that circumstances alter cases, and that we >> can't always rely on our intuition to determine how specific methods >> work, let alone whether they are available. > > But it's telling that by adopting precisely the implementation that we > currently have for lists, we can have a tuple method which does what > most people would reasonably expect. "Why are we suddenly getting > single characters instead of whole strings?" people have presumably > exclaimed often enough, illustrating that the sequence nature of > strings is a controversial topic. Lists and tuples, however, don't > have such controversial baggage. > You can call something non-controversial when it generates a thread like this? :-) It's really a storm in a teacup. The acid test would be to generate a patch that added the method and then see if you could get a committer to commit it. All else (including my own contributions) is mere hot air.
>> I hear the screams of "just add the index() method to tuples and have >> done with it" and, to an extent, can sympathize with them. But that way >> lies creeping featurism and the next thing you know we'll have a ternary >> operator in the language - oh wait, we do now! > > Yes, but the cost of adding index to tuples is minimal, and the mental > cost to programmers is arguably negative. Meanwhile, we now have to > put up with the syntactic bodge that is the ternary operator until the > time comes when it gets deprecated as something that didn't work out > or wasn't really necessary (in Python 4000, perhaps), meaning that we > now have to read third-party code more carefully, the people writing > editors and tools have to change their lexers/parsers again, and so > on. > What can I say? Every language has warts. Some people were as anxious to see if ... else (which I regard as a wart) put in as others are to see tuple.index(). regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://del.icio.us/steve.holden Recent Ramblings http://holdenweb.blogspot.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
