On Friday 17 October 2003 06:12 pm, Skip Montanaro wrote:
Greg> What you're proposing hijacks the indexing syntax and uses it to Greg> mean something completely different from indexing, which is a much Greg> bigger change, and potentially a very confusing one.
Greg> So, no, sorry, it doesn't overcome my objection!
I agree. Any expression bracketed by '[' and ']', no matter how many other clues to the ultimate result it might contain, ought to result in a list as far as I'm concerned.
Hmmm, how is, e.g. foo[x*x for x in bar] any more an "expression bracketed by [ and ]" than, say, foo = {'wot': 'tow'} foo['wot'] ...? Yet the latter doesn't involve any lists that I can think of. Nor do I see why the former need "mean something completely different from indexing" -- it means to call foo's __getitem__ with the appropriately constructed object, just as e.g. foo[ 'va':23:2j, {'zip':'zop'}:45:(3,4) ] today calls it with a tuple of two weird slice objects (and doesn't happen to involve any lists whatsoever). Alex