On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 7:52 PM, Kirill Balunov <kirillbalu...@gmail.com> wrote: > This thought occurred to me several times, but I could not decide to write. > And since `filter` is a builtin, I think this change should be discussed > here, before opening an issue on bug tracker. > > I propose to delete all references in the `filter` documentation that the > first argument can be `None`, with possible depreciation of `None` as the > the first argument - FutureWarning in Python 3.8+ and deleting this option > in Python 4. Personally, regarding the last point - depreciation, I do not > see this as a great necessity, but I do not find that the option with `None` > should be offered and suggested through the documentation. Instead, it is > better to show an example with using `filter(bool, iterable)` which is > absolutely > equivalent, more readable, but a little bit slower. > > %timeit [*filter(None, range(10))] > 503 ns ± 0.259 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each) > > %timeit [*filter(bool, range(10))] > 512 ns ± 1.09 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each) > > Currently documentation for `None` case uses `identity function is > assumed`, what is this `identity` and how it is consistent with > truthfulness?
The identity function is: filter(lambda x: x, range(10)) How is it consistent with truthiness? Exactly the same way the underlying object is. There's no requirement for the predicate function to return True or False - it's perfectly acceptable, for instance, to do this: filter(lambda x: x % 3, range(10)) to eliminate all multiples of three. That said, though, any use of filter() that involves a lambda function should probably become list comps or genexps, so filter itself should only be used when there really IS a pre-existing function that does the job. So, for instance, you could strip out every occurrence of the string "0" with: filter(int, list_of_strings) And that still depends on the normal Python rules for boolification. If that's valid, then it should be just as viable to say "filter(identity-function, ...)", which is spelled "filter(None, ...)". ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
