On Mar 19, 9:33 pm, Kottiyath <n.kottiy...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mar 19, 8:42 pm, Paul McGuire <pt...@austin.rr.com> wrote: > > > > > On Mar 19, 4:39 am, Kottiyath <n.kottiy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I understand that my question was foolish, even for a newbie. > > > I will not ask any more such questions in the future. > > > Gaaah! Your question was just fine, a good question on coding style. > > I wish more people would ask such questions so that bad habits could > > be avoided. > > > The newbie posts that are annoying are the ones that: > > - are answered on page 1 of any tutorial ("how do I get the second > > character of a string?") > > - are obvious homework assignments with no actual effort on the > > poster's part ("how do I write a Python program to find the first 10 > > prime numbers?") > > - pontificate on what is wrong with Python, based on 2 hours' > > experience with the language (often titled "What's wrong with Python", > > with content like "Python sucks because it doesn't have a switch > > statement/has significant whitespace/doesn't check types of arguments/ > > isn't totally object-oriented like Java/doesn't have interfaces/...") > > - are so vague as to be just Usenet noise (titled "Help me", with no > > content, or "i need to write a program and don't know where to start > > can someone write it for me?") > > > I think Daniel's joke was on the rest of us, who each had to chime in > > with our favorite dict processing algorithm. > > > It *would* be good for you as a newbie to get an appreciation of the > > topics that were covered in these responses, though, especially the > > distinction between updating the dict in-place vs. creating a new > > dict. > > > -- Paul > > Daniel, Sorry for misunderstanding your post. I hope I was not being > passive-aggresive - (also because I found that the second mechanism I > provided was quite horrible :-), so I was indeed being foolish > there. ) > > Paul/Aahz, I did understand 2 things > (1) When using map always consider that the function will be called > everytime, so the hit on the performance is more. > (2) The second mechanism and the first mechanism provides different > solutions (new dict/same dict) > both of which I did not think about at all. > > Also, thank you everyone for all the help. I have been following this > thread for the last 4 months (when I started with python) and I have > learned a lot. The amount of help provided here is amazing. > > p.s. -> English is indeed not my first language :-)
Oops, Forgot to mention the biggest learning. Readability is better than brevity - Thanks to Rhodri. This was a question which was bugging me all the time. When I look at code, I am always envious when I see the same code written in much smaller number of lines. Now, I will force myself to ask the questions Rhodri proposed (esp: does it look uglier part) before deciding whether or not to go ahead with brevity. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list