Good Python style?

Hi, I found the following quite cryptic code, which basically reads the first column of some_file into a set. In Python I am used to seeing much more verbose/explicit code. However, the example below _may_ actually be faster than the usual "for line in ..." Do you consider this code good Python st

mutable numeric type

There has been quite some traffic about mutable and immutable data types on this list. I understand the issues related to mutable numeric data types. However, in my special case I don't see a better solution to the problem. Here is what I am doing: I am using a third party library that is perfo

Adding to Exception.args

Hi, If an exception gets raised while I am parsing an input file I would like to know where (in which line) the error occured. I do not want to create my own exception class for that purpose and I also do not want to deal with all possible kinds of exceptions that might occur. I came up with t

Re: NaN support etc.

/Sébastien Boisgérault wrote:/ > But, practically, I have never found a platform where > the following fpconst-like code did not work: > > import struct > cast = struct.pack > > big_endian = cast('i',1)[0] != '\x01' > if big_endian: >nan = cast('d', '\x7F\xF8\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00')[0] > els

NaN support etc.

Hi, How do I find out if NaN, infinity and alike is supported on the current python platform? I could do the following: try: nan = float('NaN') have_nan = True except ValueError: have_nan = False Is there an 'official' handle for obtaining this information? Similar: How do I get the max

Re: string goes away

OK, you won. I read in an (regretably old) guidline for improving Python's performance that you should prefer map() compared to list comprehensions. Apparently the performance of list comprehensions has improved a lot, which is great. (Or the overhead of calling map() got too big, but I hope th

Re: string goes away

Yeeh, I was expecting something like that. The only reason to use map() at all is for improving the performance. That is lost when using list comprehensions (as far as I know). So, this is *no* option for larger jobs. Andreas Skip Montanaro wrote: >>> upper_list = map(string.upper, list_of_st

string goes away

Hi: If I am getting the docs etc. correctly, the string-module is depricated and is supposed to be removed with the release of Python 3.0. I still use the module a lot and there are situations in which I don't know what to do without it. Maybe you can give me some help. I loved to use >>> string