On 15 Dec 2005 05:08:02 -0800 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I would say that if "only one way to do it" is the intend, > make it into the language and any other way is simply > error. Say if ternary operator is not the "preferred way", > don't have it in the language. If someone find a way to > work around it, change that part of the language to break > their code.
But that is precisely what it does mean -- Python's language design tries to be "reasonably minimal": there's usually one fairly easy way to do a task. Unintentionally, there may well be a half-dozen really hard ways to do it. The point of telling this to the potential coder is to suggest that "if it's hard, you're probably doing it the wrong way" and nudge them into looking at how the language designers have intended those problems to be solved. But of course, this is simply a reaction to the Perl motto: Having a half-dozen more or less equally difficult, equally documented methods, with no expressed preference, means that you will find all half-dozen in the wild, which means in turn that reading and understanding code is six-times harder to do. Since readability is the primary use of source code, this translates to the language being pretty close to six-times harder to use overall. The problem that has happened with Python is that as the language is improved, the old "best way" gets replaced with a new "best way" (hopefully easier). The Python development team's response to this problem is to specifically deprecate the old way, and encourage users to adopt the new way. Generally, the old way does still work so that code isn't needlessly broken, though there have been exceptions (such as when the scoping rules were changed). OTOH, no one can possibly anticipate everything you need to do, and it is always possible that you have important requirements for doing things a certain way. We assume that you are mature enough to know the difference between "breaking the rules accidentally" and "breaking the rules on purpose". -- Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
