Re: [Python-ideas] Sort statement

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Brandon Mintern wrote:

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 7:48 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:

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I don't think that sorting is a frequent enough operation in general to justify having its own statement.

Agreed.

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The main advantage is that it is impossible to make this mistake:

x = y.sort()

If you make that mistake, you find out about it very quickly, and you learn not to make it again.

Yes, but having .sort() return self would also solve this problem without anything as radical as introducing a new keyword and syntax. I'm not saying that this should be done, but I think this would be a much better alternative than the proposed sort syntax.

But that would be more confusing and make it seem to the newbie that .sort() returns a *new* sorted list rather than sorting the list in-place. Returning None (or not returning anything, which has the same effect) is idiomatic in Python to indicate a method is a mutator. And they'll quickly get a "TypeError: unsubscriptable object" and learn this lesson if they use list.sort() incorrectly. Although I admit, that error message could be improved. At least including the object in question would be better, for instance: TypeError: unsubscriptable object "None" Or perhaps also changing "unsubscriptable" to something more comprehensible to newbies: TypeError: object "None" does not support the subscript operator - Chris R.

Brandon _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas