[Python-ideas] Re: We should have an explicit concept of emptiness for collections

On 8/23/21 1:15 PM, Tim Hoffmann via Python-ideas wrote:

If you want to write a function that accepts array-like `values`, you have to change a check `if values` to `if len(values) == 0`. That works for both but is against the PEP8 recommendation. This is a shortcoming of the language.

Numpy is not Python, but a specialist third-party package that has made specialist choices about basic operations -- that does not sound like a shortcoming of the language. It seems to me that the appropriate fix is for numpy to have an "is_empty()" function that knows how to deal with arrays and array-like structures, not force every container to grow a new method. -- ~Ethan~