+1 Because Counter is mutable object, I think += should mutate left side object.
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Lars Buitinck <l.j.buiti...@uva.nl> wrote: > Hello, > > [First off, I'm not a member of this list, so please Cc: me in a reply!] > > I've found some counterintuitive behavior in collections.Counter while > hacking on the scikit-learn project [1]. I wanted to use a bunch of > Counters to do some simple term counting in a set of documents, > roughly as follows: > > count_total = Counter() > for doc in documents: > count_current = Counter(analyze(doc)) > count_total += count_current > count_per_doc.append(count_current) > > Because we target Python 2.5+, I implemented a lightweight replacement > with just the functionality we need, including __iadd__, but then my > co-developer ran the above code on Python 2.7 and performance was > horrible. After some digging, I found out that Counter [2] does not > have __iadd__ and += copies the entire left-hand side in __add__! > > I also figured out that I should use the update method instead, which > I will, but I still find that uglier than +=. I would submit a patch > to implement __iadd__, but I first want to know if that's considered > the right behavior, since it changes the semantics of +=: > > >>> from collections import Counter > >>> a = Counter([1,2,3]) > >>> b = a > >>> a += Counter([3,4,5]) > >>> a is b > False > > would become > > # snip > >>> a is b > True > > TIA, > Lars > > > [1] > https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/commit/de6e93094499e4d81b8e3b15fc66b6b9252945af > [2] http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/collections/__init__.py#l399 > > > -- > Lars Buitinck > Scientific programmer, ILPS > University of Amsterdam > _______________________________________________ > 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/songofacandy%40gmail.com > -- INADA Naoki <songofaca...@gmail.com> _______________________________________________ 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