On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Erik Max Francis<m...@alcyone.com> wrote: > Chris Rebert wrote: >> >> On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Erik Max Francis<m...@alcyone.com> wrote: >>> >>> Steven D'Aprano wrote: >>>> >>>> But it's not "practically every function". It's hardly any function at >>>> all >>>> -- in my code, I don't think I've ever wanted this behavior. I would >>>> consider it an error for function(42) and function([42]) to behave the >>>> same >>>> way. One is a scalar, and the other is a vector -- they're different >>>> things, >>>> it's poor programming practice to treat them identically. >>>> >>>> (If Matlab does this, so much the worse for Matlab, in my opinion.) >>> >>> There's actually good reason to do this in heavily matrix-oriented >>> specialized languages; there are numerous applications where scalars and >>> 1x1 >>> matrices are mathematically equivalent. >> >> The pertinent issue here being that Python, as a language, is neither >> matrix-oriented nor special-purpose. :) > > Yes. And I was responding to the comment that such a feature of a language > would a priori be poor design. It _isn't_ poor design for special purpose > languages. Python isn't one of them, but Matlab _is_.
I was agreeing with your point actually. That was what I was trying to convey in my post. Apparently I wasn't as successful in that regard as I'd hoped. - Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
