On Jun 7, 2006, at 3:41 PM, Aahz wrote: > On Wed, Jun 07, 2006, Raymond Hettinger wrote: >> Fredrik: >>> >>> for users, it's actually quite simple to figure out what's in the _ >>> variable: it's the most recently *printed* result. if you cannot >>> see >>> it, it's not in there. >> >> Of course, there's a pattern to it. The question is whether it is >> the >> *right* behavior. Would the underscore assignment be more useful and >> intuitive if it always contained the immediately preceding result, >> even if it was None? In some cases (such as the regexp example), >> None >> is a valid and useful possible result of a computation and you may >> want to access that result with _. > > My take is that Fredrik is correct about the current behavior being > most > generally useful even if it is slightly less consistent, as well as > being > undesired in rare circumstances. Consider that your message is the > only > one I've seen in more than five years of monitoring python-dev and > c.l.py.
I agree. I've definitely made use of the current behavior, e.g. for printing a different representation of _ before doing something else with it. -bob _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
