James Stroud wrote: > Diez B. Roggisch wrote: > >>>Okay, I've googled "leaky abstractions" (as was probably your intended >>>affect with your silence), read the famous essay, and still >>>don't know what you mean and how it applies to what I have described. >>> >>>Do you plan to justify your statement or emptily accuse people of >>>violating >>>esoteric principles? >> >> >>While I can't claim to know what the effbot thinks (the >>skull-socks-wearing-python-coder-mindlink-technology is yet to be >>developed), I think it's pretty clear what he is after here: >> >>Computers compute offsets into data zero-based. Some languages like >>pascal completely abstract that away from the user, but python doesn't. >> >>So if your colleague/boss/whatever insists on indices being one-based, >>this abstraction you introduced for her pretty fast leaks pretty badly. >>Consider this simple example: >> >>for offset, item in enumerate(some_list, start=1): >> if item.is_the_chosen_one(): >> chosen_one_offset = offset >> >>the_chosen_one = some_list[chosen_one_offset] >> >>And bang, its Judas not Petrus who gets the pearly gates inc. stock >>options. >> >>Diez > > > Thank you for this explanation. Very illuminating. I think understand > this idea well and the thought of 1 basing this function makes me cringe > as much as the next guy (though I lacked the vocabulary to explain > exactly why I cringe). > > But you see, weaning this university faculty level economist (who > already has her own way of doing everything...and to whom I happen to be > married) from the traditional economics tools of gauss and sas towards > the more sane and flexible tools of python, numarray, and rpy has been a > multi-stage process. Tweaking the chosen abstractions to not be as leaky > (thank you and thank Fredrik for introducing me to this vocabulary) is > still one of the things I'm working towards. I want to solidify the > conversion before I concentrate on nuance. > > So, before too much criticism, I challenge even the most skilled python > programmer to find his or her own faculty economist (or statistician or > physicist) and get them to radically change their computational tools. > When you've walked a mile in my shoes, leaky abstractions won't seem > like such a big deal after all. > Divorce is obviously the only answer. How could you end up marrying someone who counts from one and not zero? ;-)
regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list