06-09-2009 o 20:20:21 Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
In the dbf module I wrote, I use both the attribute access and the key lookup. The attribute access is great for interactive use, and for all the routines that play with the tables we have at work, where all the field names are indeed known at compile (aka coding) time. On the other hand, some routines don't know which fields they'll mucking about with, and so the key access is vital for them.
Of course, I could have done the whole thing using key access, and I did have to impose some restrictions on method names so they wouldn't clash with possible field names, but I love being able to type
current_record.full_name == last_record.full_name
instead of
current_record['full_name'] == last_record['full_name']
Me too, and I suppose many people too... The latter: * makes your code less readable if there is high density of such expressions; * makes typing much more strenuous/irritating -- what is not very important in case of advanced development (when time of typing is short in relation to time of thinking/reading/testing) but becomes quite important in case of scripting (which is still important area of Python usage). -- Jan Kaliszewski (zuo) <zuo@chopin.edu.pl>