On Jun 8, 11:11 pm, Mensanator <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jun 8, 4:04 am, Lie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > On Jun 8, 8:56 am, Mensanator <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Jun 7, 8:22�pm, John Salerno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > Mensanator wrote: > > > > > What I DID say was that how the builtins actually > > > > > work should be understood and it APPEARED that the > > > > > OP didn't understand that. Maybe he understood that > > > > > all along but his example betrayed no evidence of > > > > > that understanding. > > > > > Well, the truth is that I know zip truncates to the shorter of the two > > > > arguments, > > > > Ok, sorry I thought otherwise. > > > > > and also in my case the two arguments would always be the > > > > same length. > > > > Yes, because you're controlling the source code. > > > But since lists are mutable, source code literals > > > don't always control the length of the list. > > > Since when source code literals ever control the length of a list? > > Isn't score_costs = [0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3] > considered a literal?
Yep, but it's not the sole controller of the length of a list. There are other things that might control the length of the list like del, append, etc. > > What controls the length of the list is the semantic meaning of the > > list, > > Wha do you mean by that? The list contains 11 objects. > How could the length be any different? What I meant is in some cases (not all) the list might semantically be nonsense if it is of different length (i.e. it have fixed length). > > in some cases it just makes no sense that the list would ever > > have different length. > > And in such case there won't be any problem, will there? > > Is that a good habit to teach a newbie? To write > code that only works for special cases? I think it is up to the programmer to decide whether special case is enough or a general case is necessary. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
