On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 7:54 PM, Pierre Quentel
<pierre.quen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Still, it tends to be a lot harder to explain, document, and read
>> documentation for, something that uses operators weirdly, rather than
>> keyword-searchable method names.
>
> You don't explain how to use the Python syntax (for instance the operator %,
> which behaves very differently between integers and strings) by explaining
> what happens in the underlying C code in the different cases, do you ?
Agreed, and it's sometimes confusing. I don't see "string % tuple" as
a good syntax; I prefer to spell it sprintf("format",arg,arg,arg).
When it comes to operators on strings, what I'd prefer to see is
something that does more-or-less what the operator does with integers
- for instance:
"This is a string" / " " ==> ["This","is","a","string"]
Taking a string modulo a tuple doesn't make any sense in itself, so it
CAN be given an alternative meaning. But if you see that in a program
and aren't sufficiently familiar with %s formatting to recognize it,
how are you going to locate the documentation on the subject? Googling
for 'python % string' doesn't help; 'python string modulo' brings up
an article on informit.com that explains the matter, but nothing
official. By contrast, searching for 'c sprintf' brings up heaps of
useful links, because 'sprintf' is a searchable keyword.
On the flip side, operator-based notations end up a lot more compact.
I'd definitely not want to give up, for instance, list comprehension
syntax. Difficulty of searching for docs is a downside, but definitely
not a blocker.
ChrisA
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