Stephen McInerney wrote: > Guys, > > I'm annoyed at how far offtopic
If you get annoyed at threads drifting off-topic you'd better stay away from all public mailing lists! > and frankly rude the responses to my > email were, Re-reading the entire thread I don't see anything I would construe as rude. I think you need to lighten up a bit. > I didn't get much decent opinion on my central question: > "isn't this idiom more restrictive than C/C++/Java (aka the rest of the > universe), You got considerable disagreement, it seems to me. Most of the posts are either explicitly disagreeing or trying to point you to the Python way of doing things. > Nobody attempted to address the valid > follow-on question about generators returning a tuple (e.g. walking a > pointer, > and incrementing a count, let alone anything more complex) I don't see any question about generators and tuples. Maybe you should start a new thread about that, it's pretty off-topic for this one ;) > - quibbling the motivation for the quicksort example I gave was clearly > offtopic; > I'm very well aware there are better Python implementions, that's > irrelevant; > the motivation was to give a legitimate example which clearly arises > commonly. Wait. You say it is a "legitimate example that occurs commonly" but we are not allowed to talk about other ways to do it? You actually seem to have two items on your agenda - convincing us that for loops in C are more powerful than in Python, and that Python is lacking - changing the docs to reflect this We don't buy the first item so the second one doesn't get much traction. > - This is offtopic, Uh oh! > but the C for-loop syntax is very syntactically > powerful, > so when people perceive Python lacks it, they may baulk at that. We have to > do a better job selling why Python is better. > The C for-loop syntax itself is not error-prone at all. > Unless you mean off-by-one errors etc., missing initializations, and > those are mostly semantic not syntax-related. Yeah other than that it isn't error-prone at all. >> > It's regrettable we have to choose between the clear and the >> > efficient, in this situation. >> >> The most clear and efficient is probably: >> >> myList.sort() > > Alan - this was totally unnecessary and trashes the entire (legitimate) > context of my question. The point is that Python has efficient ways to do many common operations that may be different from the way you expect. Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
