[Peter Hansen] ... > I suppose I shouldn't blame setdefault() itself for being poorly named,
No, you should blame Guido for that <wink>. > 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. :-) I wanted to call it getorset() -- so much so that even now I sometimes still type that instead! The "get" part reminds me that it's fetching a value, same as dict.get(key, default) -- "or set"'ing it too if there's not already a value to "get". If you have a fancy enough editor, you can teach it to replace setdefault by getorset whenever you type the former ;-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
