On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jul 25, 2010, at 2:32 PM, Michael Foord wrote:
x = y in z # where x is a non boolean.
Yuck.
How is it any worse than:
x = y > z # where x is a non boolean
And all the other operators that already do this?
Terrible sales technique: "how is this any worse than ..." ;-)
Whoa. Reformulate as a consistency argument and I totally buy it.
Other operations such as rich comparisons have complicated our lives but had sufficient offsetting benefits than made them more bearable. Rich comparisons cause no end of trouble but at least they allow the numeric folks to implement some well studied behaviors than have proven benefits in their domain.
True. The argument for rich comparisons is that "A = B <= C" where B and C are matrices of the same shape could return a matrix of bools of the same shape, like a generalization for "A = [b <= c for b, c in zip(B, C)]".
In contrast, this proposal offers almost zero benefit to offset the pain it will cause. The OP didn't even offer a compelling use case or a single piece of code that wouldn't be better written with a normal method.
OTOH, there is a similar use case: "A = B in C" could be defined by the author of a matrix type as (the similar generalization of) "A = [b in c for b, c in zip(B, C)]". This is still somewhat less compelling than for rich comparisons because the elements of C corresponding to those in would have to be sequences. But it is not totally uncompelling. BTW Alex *did* mention a use case: expression recoding like SQLAlchemy.
No existing code expects "in" to return a non-boolean.
Most existing code also doesn't care, and all predefined implementations of __contains__ will still return bools. It's only folks like NumPy who would care. We should ask them though -- they had a chance to ask for this when rich comparisons were introduced, but apparently didn't.
A lot of code for containers or that uses containers implicitly expects simple invariants to hold: for x in container: assert x in container
Yeah, a lot of code using comparisons also breaks when comparisons don't return bools. It's a specialized use, but I don't see it as anathema. OTOH the real solution would be something like LINQ in C# (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa904594.aspx, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query).
Raymond
P.S. With rich comparisons, we've lost basics assumptions like equality operations being reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. We should be cautioned by that experience and only go down that path again if there is a darned good reason.
So where's the pain? I don't recall ever seeing a report from someone who was bitten by this. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)