On Thursday, December 11, 2014 8:05:13 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > But I have a different question -- can this be demonstrated without the > > 'is'? > > Because to me 'is' -- equivalently id -- is a code-smell and is like > > explaining funny behavior by showing the dis -- like > > $ gcc -S ... > > -- output. > > > > It can always explain, but indicates that the semantics is not > > (sufficiently) abstract in this aspect > > Not so. Object identity is a fundamental part of Python. > Indistinguishable-but-distinct mutable objects are crucial to Python's > behaviour.
You are saying much the same as I am. Most programmers try to write programs without gotos. Good (C) programmers know that 1. gotos can be more efficient than 'structured' code 2. And even sometimes more elegant -- think of coding a non-trivial automaton with State=Label, Transition=goto Still most (reasonable) C-programmers will at least try to write goto-less code. Analogously here: 'is/id' are part of python. Nevertheless *explaining* something with and without these are significantly different. Naturally we may have different feelings about 'is' in python. However 'agree/disagree' is (in my book) a verb that is applied to facts not feelings :-) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list