On 7 October 2011 11:37, Jakob Bowyer <jkbbwr@gmail.com> wrote:
There is that but from a math point of view the syntax a * b does make sence. Its slightly clearer and makes more sense to people from outside of a programming background.
I'm not sure I'd agree, even though I come from a maths background. Explicit is better than implicit and all that... Even if it is slightly clearer to some people, I bet there are others (not from a mathematical background) who would be confused by it. And in that case, itertools.product is easier to google for than "*"...) And that's ignoring the cost of implementing, testing, documenting the change. Actually, just to give a flavour of the sorts of design decisions that would need to be considered, consider this:
a = set((1,2)) b = set((3,4)) c = set((5,6)) from itertools import product def times(s1,s2): ... return set(product(s1,s2)) ... times(a,times(b,c)) {(1, (3, 6)), (2, (3, 5)), (2, (4, 5)), (1, (4, 6)), (1, (4, 5)), (2, (3, 6)), (2, (4, 6)), (1, (3, 5))} times(times(a,b),c) {((2, 4), 6), ((1, 4), 5), ((1, 4), 6), ((2, 3), 6), ((1, 3), 6), ((2, 3), 5), ((2, 4), 5), ((1, 3), 5)}
So your multiplication isn't commutative (the types of the elements in the 2 expressions above are different). That doesn't seem intuitive - so maybe a*b*c should be a set of 3-tuples. But how would that work? The problem very quickly becomes a lot larger than you first assume. Operator overloading is used much more sparingly in Python than in, say, C++. It's as much a language style issue as anything else. Sorry, but I still don't see enough benefit to justify this. Paul.