On 01/17/2011 09:04 AM, Luc Goossens wrote:
Hi all,
Thanks to everybody for your feedback! So I guess the answer to my question (which - I noticed just now - did not end with a question mark), is ... no.
If your function is returning a bunch of related values in a tuple, and that tuple keeps changing as you re-design the code, that's a code smell.
the use cases I have in mind are the functions that return a set of weakly related values, or more importantly report on different aspects of the calculation; an example of the first is a divmod function that returns the div and the mod while callers might only be interested in the div; examples of the latter are the time it took to calculate the value, possible warnings that were encountered, ...
You could use a class instead of a function to get different variations on a function.
class DivMod: ... def div(self, x, y): ... return x//y ... def mod(self, x, y): ... return x%y ... def __call__(self, x, y): ... return x//y, x%y ... dmod = DivMod() dmod(100, 7) (14, 2) dmod.div(100, 7) 14 dmod.mod(100, 7) 2
Adding methods, to time and/or get warnings, should be fairly easy. If you do a bunch of these, you can make a base class and reuse the common parts. For timing, logging, and checking returned values of functions, decorators can be very useful. Cheers, Ron