Ken Seehart wrote:
> Will McGugan wrote:
>> I would actualy use the following for this particular case..
>>
>> text = line[n:n+1] or 'nothing'
> Hey are you a perl programmer? That looks perlish to me. A python
> programmer would never use "or" that way (even though it works). :)
I don't think that's at all true. The pattern "somevalue or default" is
an accepted idiom for returning a default value when "somevalue" is
False, often used inside __init__ methods to set up attributes. A most
common case is like this (inside a class obviously):
def meth(self, things=None):
self.things = things or []
(The reason you don't just use a keyword argument of "things=[]" should
be obvious to all but newbies, and they'll learn a lot by researching
why so I won't say here. ;-) )
The alternative is fine too, but insisting on it would be pedantic, and
if you have more than one of these it is definitely less readable (and,
therefore, not Pythonic):
def meth(self, things=None):
if things:
self.things = things
else:
self.things = []
> It's okay, I used to be a perl programmer too. It's nothing to be
> ashamed of. :)
Ah, now I would disagree with that as well! ;-)
-Peter
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