My personal favorite would be ruby's iterators and blocks. Instead of writing a bunch of repetitive list comprehensions or defining a bunch of utility functions, you just use the iterators supported by container objects. For instance,
[f(x) for x in y] could be written in Ruby as y.collect |x| do #body of f end You don't have to use a lambda or define f() externally. Best of all, Ruby's containers come with many iterators for common cases builtin. Joseph Garvin wrote: > As someone who learned C first, when I came to Python everytime I read > about a new feature it was like, "Whoa! I can do that?!" Slicing, dir(), > getattr/setattr, the % operator, all of this was very different from C. > > I'm curious -- what is everyone's favorite trick from a non-python > language? And -- why isn't it in Python? > > Here's my current candidate: > > So the other day I was looking at the language Lua. In Lua, you make a > line a comment with two dashes: > > -- hey, this is a comment. > > And you can do block comments with --[[ and ---]]. > > --[[ > hey > this > is > a > big > comment > --]] > > This syntax lets you do a nifty trick, where you can add or subtract a > third dash to change whether or not code runs: > > --This code won't run because it's in a comment block > --[[ > print(10) > --]] > > --This code will, because the first two dashes make the rest a comment, > breaking the block > ---[[ > print(10) > --]] > > So you can change whether or not code is commented out just by adding a > dash. This is much nicer than in C or Python having to get rid of """ or > /* and */. Of course, the IDE can compensate. But it's still neat :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
