Patrick Maupin wrote: > The argument that one should always use len() to test whether sequences > are empty or not simply because the use of len() gives a free "is it a > sequence?" type-check is not apt to be well received by an audience > which rejects explicit type-checking in general.
No explicit type check. More of an implicit behaviour check. OK, wise guys are not apt to be well received by ... well, any audience. > The perverse wish, expressed in the specific example, that SOME piece > of code SOMEWHERE should PLEASE throw an exception because some idiot > passed a generator expression rather than a list into a function, is > not apt to be well received by an audience which strives for generality > when it makes sense; and I daresay most members of that audience, if > confronted with the wished-for exception, would fix the function so > that it quite happily accepted generator expressions, rather than > changing a conditional to use len() just so that an equivalent > exception could happen a bit earlier. Premature generalization: the new 'premature optimization'. Daniel -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
