[Python-3000] [PythonInfo Wiki] Update of "GoogleSprintPy3k" by 65.57.245.11

[Guido van Rossum]

On 8/21/06, Fredrik Johansson <fredrik.johansson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/21/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > On 8/21/06, Fredrik Johansson <fredrik.johansson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 8/21/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > > > Perhaps there could be (or is there already?) a helper in itertools
> > > > that iterates over multiple iterables padding the shorter inputs with
> > > > None to the length of the longest one.
> > >
> > > I think the most convenient solution would be to handle this with a
> > > keyword argument to zip(), i.e., zip(a, b, pad=True).
> >
> > First you'll have to show me a real use case where this behavior is
> > actually needed.
>
> I didn't suggest that this feature is needed. But if it is, extending
> zip() to handle both cases hardly seems to add more cruft to the
> language than adding a whole new function (stuffed away in a library
> where not even the language's creator remembers whether it exists :-).

I beg to disagree. In general I don't like flag arguments that modify
the behavior of a call, when in practice the flag value passed will
nearly always be a constant. That's why we have e.g. find() and
rfind(), not find(..., fromright=False).

Also, I'd like to call YAGNI (and stop wasting everybody's time)
unless a good use case is brought up.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)