karmaguedon, 28.10.2010 18:46:
On 27 oct, 10:27, Arnaud Delobelle wrote:
Chris Rebert writes:
On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:25 PM, Geobird wrote:
I am a beginner in Python and would ask for a help.
I was searching for smaller version of code to calculate
factorial . Found this one
def fact(x):
return x> 1 and x * fact(x - 1) or 1
But I don't really get how ( ....x> 1 and x * fact(x - 1)....)
works .
It exploits short-circuit evaluation
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-circuit_evaluation). This is
stunt coding / code golf; no one should actually write factorial like
that.
True. It's far too verbose. I'd go for something like:
f=lambda n:n<=0 or n*f(~-n)
I've saved a few precious keystrokes and used the very handy ~- idiom!
I didn't know the idiom, nice tip.
Not really. Given that many people won't know it, most readers will have a
hard time deciphering the above code, so it's best not to do this.
Stefan
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