> Let's put it this way. Suppose that __eq__ existed and __ne__ didn't, > just like with __contains__. Go ahead: sell the notion of __ne__. > Pitch it, show why we absolutely need to allow this. Make sure you > mention the potential confusion when subclassing. Be sure to show why > it's okay for "not in" to force to boolean but "==" should allow any > return value.
__ne__ and __eq__ are important for building mask arrays in NumPy, which allow complex indexing operations. A lot of NumPy's design was inspired by MATLAB, so being able to index the same way as in MATLAB is a pretty killer feature. Indexing an array using mask arrays like this is idiomatic: some_arr = np.array([-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, -1, 3, -1, 6, 7, 3]) valid = some_arr[some_arr != -1] Anybody with familiarity with NumPy appreciates that this is possible. I imagine that ORMs like Django or SqlAlchemy also override __ne__ to provide nice APIs. Finally (and perhaps least imporant), there is a performance hit if only allowing __eq__ and then taking its inverse. Cody -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
