On 21.09.2015 15:27, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 8:55 PM, Paul Moore
wrote: There seem to be a few main use cases:
1. Dealing with functions that return a useful value or None to signal "no value". I suspect the right answer here is actually to rewrite the function to not do that in the first place. "Useful value or None" seems like a reasonable example of an anti-pattern in Python. The alternative being to raise an exception? It's generally easier, when you can know in advance what kind of object you're expecting, to have a None return when there isn't one. For example, SQLAlchemy has .get(id) to return the object for a given primary key value, and it returns None if there's no such row in the database table - having to wrap that with try/except would be a pain. This isn't an error condition, and it's not like the special case of iteration (since an iterator could yield any value, it's critical to have a non-value way of signalling "end of iteration"). I don't want to see everything forced to "return or raise" just because someone calls this an anti-pattern.
I don't think both approaches are mutual exclusive. They can both exist and provide whenever I need the right thing. Depending on the use-case, one needs to decide: If I know, the value definitely needs to be a dictionary, I use dict[...]. If I know, the value is definitely optional and I can't do anything about it, I use dict.get('key'[, default]). If I definitely don't know, I use dict[...] to get my hands on a real example with out that key if that every happens and don't waste time for special-handling a possible None return value. Best, Sven