On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:43 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:
I read Raymond's suggestion rather as a question: why bother with a tedious, multi-year process, when a three-line function will achieve exactly the same?
Because it doesn't achieve exactly the same. What I want is a sane, rational way to describe what I'm doing in the core API, so other programmers learning the language don't spend the amount of time I did perplexed that there was a .pop() and a .remove() and a .discard(), but there wasn't a .pick(). I don't want to have to write the same little helper function in every project to fill a deficiency in the library. I don't want to have to argue about the flaws in solutions with race conditions, or the fact that cheap functions become expensive functions when performed over the network, or that there's a real value in having an atomic operation which throws a sane exception when it fails, or how it's disturbing to my OCD core to have an API which believes: if x in s: s.remove(x) ... is too confusing, so there should be a .discard() method, but ... for x in s: break ... is self-evident and obvious, so there's no need for a .pick(). -- Chris