Adam Tomjack wrote: > Steven Bethard wrote: > ... >> Using a two element list to store a pair of counts has a bad code >> smell to me. > ... > > Why is that?
Note that "code smell"[1] doesn't mean that something is actually wrong, just that it might be. In Python, pairs are usually handled with tuples[2], but tuples would be inconvenient in this case, since the first value must be modified. Declaring a class with two attributes as you suggested is often a good substitute, but if the OP's code is really what it looks like, I get another code smell because declaring a class to be used by only 10 lines of code seems like overkill. I also get a code smell from a dict holding two-element lists because I've been writing in Python and answering questions on the Python-list for a couple of years now, and I've never needed one yet. ;-) STeVe [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell [2]http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general.html#why-are-there-separate-tuple-and-list-data-types -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
