[Edu-sig] Re: A better way?

Beni Cherniavsky cben at users.sf.net
Fri Dec 3 11:43:03 CET 2004


Jeff Sandys wrote:
> I showed this thread at the SeaPIG meeting and we 
> talked about handling attributes.  I pointed out 
> that the dot is an operator and that you can have 
> a space between the dot, and the group didn't 
> believe me until they tried it.
> 
>>>>s = "my string"
>>>>s . split()
> 
> ['my', 'string']
> 
> I think by showing the students that dot is an 
> operator helps them understand what is going on 
> and they might not be so concerned about making 
> the long variable and method dotted chains.
> 
It's important that they realize that the dot is not a pure operator as the 
rest of Pythons operators: the thing on its right side is not an arbitrary 
expression but an identifier.  So you can't do ``foo . (bar + baz)`` the way 
you can do ``foo * (bar + baz)``.  Showing the equivallence to `getattr()` is 
a nice way to demonstarte the fact the right argument is not an expression 
evaluated in the current environment but actually just a string.

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at users.sf.net>, who can only read email on weekends.


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