Lawrence Oluyede wrote:
> I've never seen bugs determined by operations such as:
>
> "foobar" * -1
>
> and to be honest I've never seen code like that because the semantics
> is somewhat senseless to me but I think the behavior of the expression
> evaluation of "Sequence * negative integer" should be changed from:
>
>>>> "foobar" * -1
> ''
>>>> ["foobar"] * -1
> []
>>>> ("foobar") * -1
> ''
>
> to something throwing an exception like when you try to multiplicate
> the sequence by a floating point number:
>
>>>> "foobar" * 1.0
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> TypeError: can't multiply sequence by non-int
>
> It's not a big deal to me but maybe this can be addressed in the
> python3000 branch
>
The "negative coerced to 0" behaviour is to make it easy to do things like
padding a sequence to a minimum length:
seq = seq + pad * (min_length- len(seq))
Without the current behaviour, all such operations would need to be rewritten
as:
seq = seq + pad * max((min_length- len(seq)), 0)
Gratuitous breakage that leads to a more verbose result gets a solid -1 from me
:)
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.boredomandlaziness.org
_______________________________________________
Python-3000 mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
