On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Erik Max Francis<m...@alcyone.com> wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> >> But it's not "practically every function". It's hardly any function at all >> -- in my code, I don't think I've ever wanted this behavior. I would >> consider it an error for function(42) and function([42]) to behave the same >> way. One is a scalar, and the other is a vector -- they're different things, >> it's poor programming practice to treat them identically. >> >> (If Matlab does this, so much the worse for Matlab, in my opinion.) > > There's actually good reason to do this in heavily matrix-oriented > specialized languages; there are numerous applications where scalars and 1x1 > matrices are mathematically equivalent.
The pertinent issue here being that Python, as a language, is neither matrix-oriented nor special-purpose. :) Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list