On Fri, 04 May 2018 14:38:54 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: > On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 11:04 AM, Steven D'Aprano > <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: [...]
>> My guess is that they were thinking that there's no need to complicate >> itemgetter for this use-case when it is just as easy to write up a >> quick lambda to do the job. > > I saw that. I just don't understand why the solution should require a > lambda just because that was the word used by a couple of core devs. If it were up to me, the solution wouldn't require anything beyond itemgetter *wink* In practice, we don't often use itemgetter like this: f = itemgetter(2) result = f(alist) since we could just say result = alist[2] instead. I think the main use- case for itemgetter is as a sort key: alist.sort(key=itemgetter(2)) or perhaps even map (although this will be obsoleted somewhat by list comprehensions): results = map(itemgetter(2), alist) The point being, in these cases, it is inconvenient to have to define a function ahead of time. Hence, a lambda would be the right solution: alist.sort(key=lambda item: ...) rather than having to define the key function ahead of time. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
