> I'm a fairly average programmer (better than average compared to my > immediate colleagues). I've read every tutorial I can get my hands > on, but I have no _memory_ of ever coming across the del keyword, let > alone that it is fundamental to Python,
My thought is that get/set/del are fundamental ops in almost any computing context: songs on your iPod playlist, records in a database, files in a directory, or elements in a Python list. Individual element deletion doesn't seem to come-up as much in Python because we tend to build data collections and then throw them away in their entirity. However, the concept becomes more prominent when dealing with persistence or when mutating a collection in-place. The OP was specifically seeking to do in-place modifications and so found himself in need of understanding the del-statement. IMHO, it goes with the territory. > Similarly, I remember slices simply because they are handy, not > because I have ever heard of them being fundamental before. FWIW, I regard slices to be fundamental to the language not because they are easy or that everyone automatically knows about them; rather, I am just recognizing that the concept of slices pervades the language and comes up in many different guises. It is a lesson that should not be skipped. That is why I think that the OP's problem is better solved by improved documentation than by adding an unnecessary method to the list API. > As a general rule of thumb, I would say that if a person is struggling > with a language, it is primarily a problem with the language, and than > problem with the documentation, and lastly a problem with the person. I would swap the first two. No language has yet been invented (including HTML and LOGO) that someone doesn't struggle with. In contrast, no documentation has ever been written that couldn't be improved. The "problem with the person" part goes last only because it suggests immutability. The reality is that incomplete learning is a fixable problem (independent of language or doc issues). If I never learn the del-statement, should I be surprised that I stuggle with how to express deletion? Raymond -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
