Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: > On Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:35:14 +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > > > Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> writes: > >> Firstly, replace is a verb, and I would normally read > >> td.replace(microseconds=0) as an instruction to modify td in place. > >> Traditionally, such methods in python return None. > > > > I agree with this objection. A method that is named “replace”, yet > > does not modify the object, is badly named. > > […] What else would you call it?
I'd call it “substitute”, and keep thinking until I came up with something better. I wouldn't think very hard, though, because the existing usage of ‘foo.replace’ for a create-new-object-with-different-values method is fairly well established in the Python built-in types and standard library. Local expectations do, past some threshold, override general expectations for the meaning of a term. -- \ “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not | `\ entitled to their own facts.” —US Senator Pat Moynihan | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
