On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:34:34 -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote: > I assume you mean the former to be analagous to "+=" and friends but I > am not sure since "." isn't an operator.
It's a de facto operator. If you google on "python dot operator" you will find many people who refer to it as such, and attribute lookup can be over-ridden at runtime (using __getattribute__, __getattr__, etc.) just like operators +, -, * etc. Also you can do this: >>> s = "something" >>> s . upper() 'SOMETHING' >>> (s+" else") . upper() 'SOMETHING ELSE' And even apply the dot "operator" to floats and ints, although because of the ambiguity with floats you need to be clever: >>> 1.2.is_integer() False >>> 4 .numerator 4 However, dot is not a "real" operator, whatever that means: internally, CPython treats it as a delimiter: http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#operators In practice though, I think that's a difference that makes no difference. It walks like an operator, it swims like an operator, and it quacks like an operator. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
