On Sat, 2009-04-04 at 02:03 -0500, Robert Kern wrote: > > 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.
Yup, sorry - I did mean to refer to the initial suggestion, rather than my comments > > > (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. Ok, I may have come across a little strongly (was very tired) - I'm not _actually_ saying we should remove it, I'm just pointing out why adding .clear() to lists seems to be unnecessary and slightly messy. The suggested removal of assignments to slices is a theoretical statement. > > .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). hummm - I'm sure it would be confusing behaviour if it was not available, but I'm not sure how it would be non-orthogonal -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list