Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:51:39 -0700, Ken Newton wrote:
I would think this is much more than just copy from other language
styles or 'just' a syntax change -- the apparent widespread use would
hint at a deeper need.
"Apparent" is the key word there. There are lots of people who *say* this
this useful functionality, but how many of them *actually* use it? And of
those who do use it, how many of them know what they're doing? There are
an awful lot of bad programmers out there.
In the dbf module I wrote, I use both the attribute access and the key
lookup. The attribute access is great for interactive use, and for all
the routines that play with the tables we have at work, where all the
field names are indeed known at compile (aka coding) time. On the other
hand, some routines don't know which fields they'll mucking about with,
and so the key access is vital for them.
Of course, I could have done the whole thing using key access, and I did
have to impose some restrictions on method names so they wouldn't clash
with possible field names, but I love being able to type
current_record.full_name == last_record.full_name
instead of
current_record['full_name'] == last_record['full_name']
and it's much easier on my wrists, too.
Hopefully-not-a-bad-programmer-ly yours,
~Ethan~
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