On 2009-04-03 23:48, Tim Wintle wrote:
On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 18:27 -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
agreed. If .clear was to be added then really assignments to slices
should be entirely removed.
Please tell me you are joking.
Well I'm not joking as such.
I've noticed that python-ideas seems to be positive on the idea, and has
a patch ready for Guido, obviously I'm not that anti it that I'd always
be complaining if it is implemented, I just see it as unnecessary:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2009-April/003933.html
Let's be clear: python-ideas seems positive on the idea of adding a .clear()
method. *Completely removing* slice assignment has not been broached there.
(I didn't expect such strong responses btw!)
You are proposing the removal of a general, orthogonal feature (and breaking
code in consequence!) just because of a new syntax for a single special case of
that feature. That is quite simply ridiculous.
.clear() would be non-orthogonal syntactic sugar. That's okay! Python has
syntactic sugar in a number of other places, too! Appropriate doses of syntactic
sugar and non-orthogonality are precisely what lets you implement "There should
be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." The really key word in
that sentence is "obvious", not "one".
FWIW, removing slice assignment would be a gross form of non-orthogonality, too.
__getitem__, __setitem__ and __delitem__ should all be able to accept the same
indices (or else raise exceptions in the case of immutability).
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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