On May 13, 7:46 pm, Carl Banks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On May 13, 6:09 pm, Eric Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I mainly work in other languages (mostly Ruby lately) but my text > > editor (Scribes) is python. With python being everywhere for dynamic > > scripting I thought I would read the source to learn the language > > better (I've gone through some basic tutorials but I always prefer to > > learn from real source). > > There is one significant drawback of that.... > > > So right from the start I see the following: > > > from operator import truth > > if truth(argv): > > # blah blah blah > > > It is obvious they are testing to see if any command line arguments. > > But curious for why the function is needed. > > It isn't. The above is terrible code. > > 1. You don't even need operator.truth; the built-in bool performs that > job. However, this code could have been written before the advent of > bool, so we'll give it a temporary pass. > 2. bool in unnecessary in this context. > 3. Lest someone claim that truth serves to document that you are > asking for the boolean value of argv (i.e., whether it's not empty), > it's redundnant since the if statement implies that.
4. sys.argv is never false. I presume that that the first item of argv was removed, or argv is a copy of sys.argv without the first element. Either way is bad style IMO. Leave sys.argv alone, and if you copy it without the first element, copy it to a differently-named variable. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
