On Mar 26, 2:21 am, "andrew cooke" <and...@acooke.org> wrote: > i will go against the grain slightly and say that "len" is probably the > best compromise in most situations (although i admit i don't know what > count is) because i think it will work when you expect it to and break > when you have a bug in your program. > > using a simple boolean is more robust (and what i typically do in my own > code because i am often too lazy to think carefully), but if it is given > something that is not "list-like" you won't get an error until later in > your code (and typically the sooner an error is found, the better).
When you are doing something like if A and A[-1] == 'yadda': you won't have to wait long for the exception if A is not subscriptable :-) > but i may be wrong - are there any containers (apart from pathological > hand-crafted examples) that would not define __len__()? Very unlikely. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list