(Fixed top-posting) James Carroll wrote: > On 7/11/05, Peter Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>(I always have to ignore the name to think about how it works, or it >>gets in the way of my understanding it. The name makes fairly little >>sense to me.)
> Notice the dictionary is only changed if the key was missing. James, I'll assume your reply was intended to address my comment above. It's not so much that the concept of "set the default value for this key" is poorly captured by the name "setdefault", but that the function is used almost exclusively in the idiom below, where it is critical that it also _returns_ the value, which is usually then operated on immediately, usually in the same line of code. dict.setdefault(key, defaultValue).someMethodOnKey() or dict.setdefault(key, defaultValue) #= value, where # is some operator. I suppose I shouldn't blame setdefault() itself for being poorly named, but it's confusing to me each time I see it in the above, because the name doesn't emphasize that the value is being returned, and yet that fact is arguably more important than the fact that a default is set! I can't think of a better name, though, although I might find "foo" less confusing in the above context. :-) -Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
