Jeff Sandys wrote:
I showed this thread at the SeaPIG meeting and we talked about handling attributes. I pointed out that the dot is an operator and that you can have a space between the dot, and the group didn't believe me until they tried it.
s = "my string" s . split()
['my', 'string']
I think by showing the students that dot is an operator helps them understand what is going on and they might not be so concerned about making the long variable and method dotted chains.
It's important that they realize that the dot is not a pure operator as the rest of Pythons operators: the thing on its right side is not an arbitrary expression but an identifier. So you can't do ``foo . (bar + baz)`` the way you can do ``foo * (bar + baz)``. Showing the equivallence to `getattr()` is a nice way to demonstarte the fact the right argument is not an expression evaluated in the current environment but actually just a string. -- Beni Cherniavsky <cben@users.sf.net>, who can only read email on weekends.