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Hi Caleb, On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 11:05 PM Caleb Donovick <donovick@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
What is the motivation for returning `None` on empty splits? I feel like this creates an unnecessary asymmetry. I don't personally have a use case for the this feature so I may be missing something but it seems like it would force an annoying pattern:
Split is used by the interpreter to implement except*. It needs to check whether the first value of the split is empty or not (this determines whether the except* clause executes). This is more efficiently done with None. And then there is creating an object that you don't need. The intention is that you use except* rather than do this:
``` try: foo() except ExceptionGroup as eg: g1, g2 = eg.split(predicate) for e in g1: handle_true(e) for e in g2: handle_false(e) ```
(as an aside - exception groups ended up not being iterable - that is one of the rejected ideas, see explanation there).
Also this creates an subtle difference with subgroup:
``` g1, g2 = eg.split(predicate) h1, h2 = eg.subgroup(predicate), eg.subgroup(lambda e: not predicate(e)) assert g1 == h1 and g2 == h2 # only true if `None not in {g1, g2}` ```
An empty subgroup should also return None. I see this is not mentioned in the PEP, so I will add it. Thanks. Irit