Carl Banks wrote:
On Jul 30, 4:49 am, Ethan Furman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Even for those that did realize, and in fact hoped that that is what you
were attempting to accomplish,
I was not attempting to accomplish what you think I was.
I was looking for it, but I didn't want to see it. I didn't expect to
see it. I wanted to show that "if x" doesn't have the polymorphic
advantage people mindlessly claim it does by posing the challenge and
having people fail to meet it, and for the most part the examples that
met the challenge were for minor usages. Ok, someone wrote a filter
that truly benefits from polymorphism of "if x" against very different
types, but really, these use cases aren't all that common.
It's not like it's an everyday thing for you to write "if x" instead
of "if x!=0", and that it actually saves you from having to rewrite
the condition because later you decided to use a list.
Actually, I use this construction a lot. But everybody has their own
style, and I'm certainly not going to tell you yours is wrong. One of
the fellows that works for me *loves* the (result if false, result if
true)[condition] style of immediate if's -- it's one of the first things
he learned about when studying Python, and he grins every time he talks
about it; *I* know it's not the best way to do it, and that it has it's
own set of gotchas -- so I made sure he was also aware of them, and uses
them where and when they won't blow up in our faces.
So I stand by the point I was trying to make: for your average day-to-
day programming, the main benefit of "if x" is to save keystrokes. It
doesn't help your code become more polymophic in practice. A little
more polymorphic, yes. A lot, no.
[snippitysnipsnip]
Carl Banks
Hmmm... well, I see your point. Unfortunately, even though it feels
incorrect to me, I do not (yet) have the breadth and depth of Python
experience to come up with an example that would display such exquisite
polymorphism. It also seems to me that such an example would be
non-trivial in nature. Perhaps starting a new thread with this
challenge, and adequate time (couple weeks at least, I would think)
would net you the smoking gun you were after.
At any rate, from my point of view, I like it. I like the visual
clarity and simplistic nature of "if x" -- it tells me "if x is
something", and I trust myself enough to know what I can do with the
something that is x. I also expect anyone else passing me a something
to know it has the appropriate interface to work with my code.
~Ethan~
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