On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 12:07:10PM -0600, Carl Meyer wrote:
On 09/29/2015 12:04 PM, Brian O'Neill wrote:
A further virtue of
self.vertices = vertices or []
and the like is that they coerce falsy parameters of the wrong type to the falsy object of the correct type.
E.g. if vertices is '' or 0, self.vertices will be set to [], whereas the ternary expression only tests
for not-None so self.vertices will be set to a probably crazy value.
Doesn't seem like a virtue to me, seems like it's probably hiding a bug in the calling code, which may have other ramifications. Better to have the "crazy value" visible and fail faster, so you can go fix that bug.
Agreed. Assuming the function is intended to, and documented as, using the passed in "vertices", using `or` is simply wrong, in two ways: - if vertices is a falsey value of the wrong type, say, 0.0, it will be silently replaced by [] instead of triggering an exception (usually a TypeError or AttributeError); - if vertices is a falsey value of the right type, say collections.deque(), it will be silently replaced by []. In the first case, the code is hiding a bug in the caller. In the second case, its a bug in the called code. I am very sad to see how many people still use the error-prone `x or y` idiom inappropriately, a full decade after PEP 308 was approved. (Depending on where you are in the world, it was ten years ago today, or yesterday.) `x or y` still has its uses, but testing for None is not one of them. -- Steve