En Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:29:05 -0300, Alf P. Steinbach <al...@start.no>
escribió:
* Gabriel Genellina:
En Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:23:27 -0300, Alf P. Steinbach <al...@start.no>
escribió:
foo()[bar()] += 1
One reason was as mentioned that the C++ standard has essentially the
/same wording/ about "only evaluated once" but with a more strict
meaning; in C++, with the built-in += operator
a()[foo()] += 1;
not only avoids calling a() and foo() twice, it also avoids doing the
internal indexing twice, while in python the internal indexing, locating
that item, is performed first in __getitem__ and then in __setitem__
(unless that is optimized away at lower level by caching last access,
but that in itself has overhead).
Yes, that's a common misunderstanding in people coming from other
languages with a different semantics for "assignment" and "variable".
You're not alone :)
Python does not have "lvalues" as in C++. In the statement x=1, the left
hand side does not denote an object, but a name. x.attr=1 and x[index]=1
act more like a function call (they *are* function calls actually) than
assignments.
Another reason was that §6.2 does explicitly discuss attribute
references as targets, but not subscription as target. It would have
been more clear to me if all (four?) possible target forms were
discussed. Happily you did now discuss that in the part that I snipped
above, but would've been nice, and easier for for an
other-language-thinking person :-), if it was in documentation.
Yes, probably that section should be improved (except the final example
added, the text hasn't changed since it was first written, more than 9
years ago).
Reading reference material may be terribly boring, I admit. Most people
read only the specific sections required to solve a specific problem; and
some concepts that are introduced earlier in the book are missed or
skipped.
If you haven't already done so, try at least to read these two sections
from the Language Reference: 3.1. Objects, values and types, and 4.1.
Naming and binding. They define the most important concepts in Python; the
rest are just details.
--
Gabriel Genellina
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
