Ben Sizer wrote: >> Likewise, the del keyword is fundamental -- if you >> can't get, set, and del, then you need to go back to collections >> school. > > I have hardly used the del keyword in several years of coding in > Python. Why should it magically spring to mind in this occasion? > Similarly I hardly ever find myself using slices, never mind in a > mutable context.
I just grepped through my codebase, and while I do see a number of dels with dicts, and a number of dels with instance attributes, I see only two dels with lists, both from the same module. So I think your point about infrequent use of del, at least with lists, is pretty valid. I suspect this is reinforced by the fact that del is usually not the right way to go when using lists -- repeated dels in the middle of a list is almost always less efficient than other techniques due to the underlying array implementation. That said, I didn't find anywhere in my codebase that I needed to clear a list (i.e. where ``L = []`` wasn't perfectly fine), while I do find a small number of dict clears. So I guess I don't really care if clearing a list is a little less intuitive than clearing a dict. STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
