[Diez B. Roggisch] > AdSR wrote: > > It appears that you can specify a function explicitly to take > > n-tuples as arguments. [...] Has anyone actually used it in real > > code?
I do not use it often in practice, but sometimes, yes. If the feature was not there, it would be easy to do an explicit tuple unpacking from the argument at the start of the function. It allows me to spare inventing a name for the compound formal argument. :-) > [...] as a limited form of pattern-matching [...] In one application, written long ago, I had a flurry of functions kept in a list, which were tried in turn until the call does not raise an Exception, so indicating a match. Since then, I used other means, first hoping to save at least the time it takes for creating a traceback object (but I did not time it), and later trying to get a better-than-linear time while trying to find the correct function. I never considered the feature to be atrocious. Implicit tuple unpacking occurs in a few places in Python already, it is only elegant that it also occurs while functions receive their argument. The most useful place for implicit tuple unpacking, in my experience, is likely at the left of the `in' keyword in `for' statements (and it is even nicer when one avoids extraneous parentheses). -- François Pinard http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
