I just spent a few minutes staring at a bug caused by a missing comma
-- I got a mysterious argument count error because instead of foo('a',
'b') I had written foo('a' 'b').
This is a fairly common mistake, and IIRC at Google we even had a lint
rule against this (there was also a Python dialect used for some
specific purpose where this was explicitly forbidden).
Now, with modern compiler technology, we can (and in fact do) evaluate
compile-time string literal concatenation with the '+' operator, so
there's really no reason to support 'a' 'b' any more. (The reason was
always rather flimsy; I copied it from C but the reason why it's
needed there doesn't really apply to Python, as it is mostly useful
inside macros.)
Would it be reasonable to start deprecating this and eventually remove
it from the language?
--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
Victor Stinner wrote:
2014-06-10 8:15 GMT+02:00 Neil Girdhar <mistersheik at gmail.com>:
> > I've seen this proposed before, and I personally would love this, but my
> > guess is that it breaks too much code for too little gain.
> >
> > On Wednesday, May 21, 2014 12:33:30 PM UTC-4, Frédéric Legembre wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Now | Future |
> >> ----------------------------------------------------
> >> () | () | empty tuple ( 1, 2, 3 )
> >> [] | [] | empty list [ 1, 2, 3 ]
> >> set() | {} | empty set { 1, 2, 3 }
> >> {} | {:} | empty dict { 1:a, 2:b, 3:c }
>
>
> Your guess is right. It will break all Python 2 and Python 3 in the world.
>
> Technically, set((1, 2)) is different than {1, 2}: the first creates a
> tuple and loads the global name "set" (which can be replaced at
> runtime!), whereas the later uses bytecode and only store values
> (numbers 1 and 2).
>
> It would be nice to have a syntax for empty set, but {} is a no-no.
Perhaps {,} would be a possible spelling. For consistency you might want to allow (,) to create an empty tuple as well; personally I would find that more intuitive that (()).
Wichert.
Rust language defines a special way to make an infinite loop (
http://doc.rust-lang.org/tutorial.html#loops).
I propose adding the same keyword to Python. It will be very useful for
WSGI servers and will suit as a more convenient replacement for recursion
(hence Python doesn't do TRE). I personally find it much prettier than *while
True* or *while 1*. It won't cause any problems with existing programs,
because *loop* is very rarely used as a variable name.
For instance
while True:
> do_something()
> do_something_else()
would turn to
loop:
> do_something()
> do_something_else()
On 29 June 2014 00:56, Benny Khoo <benny_khoo_99(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> rather than a special keyword in Python, how about having Python to support
> the concept of passing block (a group of statements) as argument? I thought
> that can be quite elegant solution. So a loop statement can be interpreted
> simply as a function that accept a block e.g. loop [block]?
>
> Supporting block has a lot of practical applications. I remember seeing some
> special purpose flow control functions as early as Tcl. We also see it in
> Ruby and the more recently the new Swift language.
This is a well worn path, and it's difficult to retrofit to an
existing language. Ruby, at least, relies heavily on a convention of
taking blocks as the last argument to a function to make things work,
which is a poor fit to Python's keyword arguments and far more varied
positional signatures for higher order functions.
PEP 403 and PEP 3150 are a couple of different explorations of the
idea a more block-like feature.
http://python-notes.curiousefficiency.org/en/latest/pep_ideas/suite_expr.ht…
is one that goes even further to consider a delineated subsyntax for
Python that would allow entire suites as expressions.
However, the stumbling block all these proposals tend to hit is that
proponents really, really, struggle to come up with compelling use
cases where "just define a named function" isn't a clearer and easier
to understand answer.
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan(a)gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
One problem I often encounter is with import search.
An example of the problem is with the package mercurial. It has extensions in a
subdirectory called 'hgext'.
On fedora, I install mercurial using the vendor package. This creates
/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/hgext/
Later, I want to try out an extension as a non-privileged user.
cd <extension>
python setup.py install --user
Now I also have
~/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/hgext
but python won't search there for extensions. Once if finds the system hgext
directory, it won't look also in the local one.
Any thoughts?
Dear all,
At work we use a notation like LDA[Z=5] to define a specific level of accuracy for our evaluation. This notation is used
just for textual labels, but it would be nice if it actually worked at the scripting level, which led me to think to the following:
at the moment, we have the following
>>> class A:
... def __getitem__(self, y):
... print(y)
...
>>> a=A()
>>> a[2]
2
>>> a[2,3]
(2, 3)
>>> a[1:3]
slice(1, 3, None)
>>> a[1:3, 4]
(slice(1, 3, None), 4)
>>>
I would propose to add the possibility for a[Z=3], where y would then be a
dictionary {"Z": 3}. In the case of a[1:3, 4, Z=3, R=5], the value of y would
be a tuple containing (slice(1,3,None), 4, {"Z": 3}, {"R": 5}). This allows to
preserve the ordering as specified (e.g. a[Z=3, R=4] vs a[R=4, Z=3]).
Do you think it would be a good/useful idea? Was this already discussed or proposed in a PEP?
Google did not help on this regard.
Thank you,
Stefano Borini
Handling of Paths with multiple extensions is currently not so easy with
pathlib. Specifically, I don't think there is an easy way to go from
"foo.tar.gz" to "foo.ext", because Path.with_suffix only replaces the last
suffix.
I would therefore like to suggest either
1/ add Path.replace_suffix, such that
Path("foo.tar.gz").replace_suffix(".tar.gz", ".ext") == Path("foo.ext")
(this would also provide extension-checking capabilities, raising
ValueError if the first argument is not a valid suffix of the initial
path); or
2/ add a second argument to Path.with_suffix, "n_to_strip" (although
perhaps with a better name), defaulting to 1, such that
Path("foo.tar.gz").with_suffix(".ext", 0) == Path("foo.tar.gz.ext")
Path("foo.tar.gz").with_suffix(".ext", 1) == Path("foo.tar.ext")
Path("foo.tar.gz").with_suffix(".ext", 2) == Path("foo.ext") # set
n_to_strip to len(path.suffixes) for stripping all of them.
Path("foo.tar.gz").with_suffix(".ext", 3) raises a ValueError.
Best,
Antony
It would be nice if there would be an escape hatch for situations where the
value of locale.getpreferredencoding() can't be changed (eg: windows - try
changing that to utf8
<http://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/06/19/just-another-day-using-python-3/>) in
the form of an environment variable like PYTHONPREFERREDENCODING (or
something like that).
The idea is that it would override the default encoding for open() for
platforms/situations where it's infeasible to manually specify the encoding
to open (eg: lots of old code) or change locale to something utf8-ish
(windows).
I've found an old thread
<http://grokbase.com/t/python/python-dev/116w24gdra/open-set-the-default-enc…>
about this problem but to my bewilderment no one considered using an
environment variable.
Thanks,
-- Ionel M.
[resending w/o Google Groups
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/python-ideas/PRLbe6ERtx4/0fXq3lI6TjgJ>]
I'm not sure if this is a beaten horse; I could only find vaguely related
discussions on other scoping issues (so please, by all means, point me to
past discussions of what I propose.)
The interpreter currently supports setting a custom type for globals() and
overriding __getitem__. The same is not true for __setitem__:
class Namespace(dict):
def __getitem__(self, key):
print("getitem", key)
def __setitem__(self, key, value):
print("setitem", key, value)
def fun():
global x, y
x # should call globals.__getitem__
y = 1 # should call globals.__setitem__
dis.dis(fun)
# 3 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (x)
# 3 POP_TOP
#
# 4 4 LOAD_CONST 1 (1)
# 7 STORE_GLOBAL 1 (y)
# 10 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
# 13 RETURN_VALUE
exec(fun.__code__, Namespace())
# => getitem x
# no setitem :-(
I think it is weird why reading global variables goes through the usual
magic methods just fine, while writing does not. The behaviour seems to
have been introduced in Python 3.3.x (commit e3ab8aa
<http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/e3ab8aa0216c>) to support custom
__builtins__. The documentation is fuzzy on this issue:
If only globals is provided, it must be a dictionary, which will be used
> for both the global and the local variables. If globals and locals are
> given, they are used for the global and local variables, respectively. If
> provided, locals can be any mapping object.
People at python-list
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.python/lqnYwf3-Pjw/EiaBJO5H3T0J>
were at odds if this was a bug, unspecified/unsupported behaviour, or a
deliberate design decision. If it is just unsupported, I don't think the
asymmetry makes it any better. If it is deliberate, I don't understand why
dispatching on the dictness of globals (PyDict_CheckExact(f_globals)) is
good enough for LOAD_GLOBAL, but not for STORE_GLOBAL in terms of
performance.
I have a patch (+ tests) to the current default branch straightening out
this asymmetry and will happily open a ticket if you think this is indeed a
bug.
Thanks in advance,
Robert
