Hi folks,
I'm trying to write tidy, modular code which includes a long-running process.
From time to time I MIGHT like to check in on the progress being made by that
long-running process, in various ways. Other times, I'll just want to let it
run. So I have a section of code which, generally, looks like this:
def _pass(*args):
pass
def long_running_process(arg1, arg2, arg_etc, report = _pass):
result1 = do_stuff()
report(result1)
result2 = do_some_different_stuff()
report(result2)
result3 = do_even_more_stuff()
report(result3)
return result3
This does what I want. When I do not specify a report function, the process
simply runs. Typically, when I do supply a report function, it would print
something to stdout, or draw an update through a GUI.
But this approach seems a tad cumbersome and unPythonic to me, particularly the
part where I define the function _pass() which accepts an arbitrary argument
list, and does nothing but... pass.
This has led me to ask the question, what exactly IS pass? I played with the
interpreter a bit.
IDLE 2.6.6 ==== No Subprocess ====
>>> pass
>>> pass()
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> type(pass)
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
So, pass does not appear to be a function, nor even an object. Is it nothing
more than a key word?
And would there be any merit to having some syntactic sugar which allows pass
to behave like the _pass() function I wrote, if it were called?
As you can see, I'm programming in Python 2.6. I don't know whether pass is
handled differently in Python 3.
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