I would like to present an argument both for and against the proposal. Against: I've never personally needed this capability.
For: In many languages, the 'null' value has a special polymorphic behavior in that it is considered a subtype of all reference types. Thus in C, you can assign NULL to a Foo * or a Bar * even though Foo and Bar aren't related. So making NULL special seems in line with the general trend. Raymond Hettinger wrote: >> You should have been there when this was decided about two years ago. > > IIRC, the decision was a general one about cross-type > comparisons not being turned-on the default. I do not > recall a specific discussion about None. > > Also, the list at the time was flooded with propositions > ranging from the reasonable to the insane. It was not always > possible to know what to respond to or the implications of each > choice. I sure wasn't aware that those conversations were to be > immediately frozen in stone. I had thought one of the purposes > of the Py3.0 was so that we could download it and explore the > implications of all of these choices. I've done so and bumped > into the None comparability issue several times. If you no > longer want feedback, that's fine. I can bring my > experimentation with the 3.0 alpha to a close. > > Raymond > _______________________________________________ > Python-3000 mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 > Unsubscribe: > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/talin%40acm.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
