On 1/28/08, Talin <talin@acm.org> wrote:
Taro wrote:
Built-in types such as float, string, or list are first-class citizens ...
myfloat = 1.0
User-defined classes are second-class citizens, requiring data to be manually converted from a type: mydecimal = Decimal("1.00000000000000001")
The problem I see with this is, what if you need to use both decimals and floats together?
Then don't overwrite the float type. :D
I've often thought that there should be a shorter spelling for decimal numbers, but I was thinking that a simple suffix letter would suffice:
mydecimal = 1.0000000000000001d
That solves a slightly different problem. It expands the set of known types to include Decimal, but it doesn't let you say: For this run, make all strings be instances of MyString, which is a string subclass with extra logging to help me debug.
And if you really are suffering repetitive strain injury from having to type 'OrderedDict' 100 times in your code, it seems to me that you could just avoid creating each one individually, and instead have an array of inputs which gets converted to an array of OrderedDict.
When I have wanted this, I didn't have an array; I had existing code with string literals sprinkled throughout. I wanted to minimize (diff-visible) changes because I knew I would back them out once the debugging or testing were done. -jJ