On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: > The only time I've naively pined for such a thing is when > misapplying C idioms for finding a minimum value. > > Python provides an excellent min implementation to use instead.
min can be a little inconvenient. As soon as anything complicated has to be done during the min expression, you need to switch to using something else for sanity's sake. In that vein, I do actually sometimes use float('inf') (for numbers), or a custom max/min object. ---- Silly and completely nonserious addendum: Forgive me, I have spoken in error! min is the one true way, for you can still do it with a little wrangling, as follows: @operator.itemgetter(1) @min @apply def closest_object(): for x in xrange(board_width) for y in xrange(board_height): try: entity = board.get_entity(x, y) except EntityNotFound: pass else: yield distance(player.pos, entity.pos), entity Please don't kill me. -- Devin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list