[Python-3000] Comparing to None
Talin
talin at acm.org
Sat Feb 2 03:04:18 CET 2008
I would like to present an argument both for and against the proposal.
Against: I've never personally needed this capability.
For: In many languages, the 'null' value has a special polymorphic
behavior in that it is considered a subtype of all reference types. Thus
in C, you can assign NULL to a Foo * or a Bar * even though Foo and Bar
aren't related.
So making NULL special seems in line with the general trend.
Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>> You should have been there when this was decided about two years ago.
>
> IIRC, the decision was a general one about cross-type
> comparisons not being turned-on the default. I do not
> recall a specific discussion about None.
>
> Also, the list at the time was flooded with propositions
> ranging from the reasonable to the insane. It was not always
> possible to know what to respond to or the implications of each
> choice. I sure wasn't aware that those conversations were to be
> immediately frozen in stone. I had thought one of the purposes
> of the Py3.0 was so that we could download it and explore the
> implications of all of these choices. I've done so and bumped
> into the None comparability issue several times. If you no
> longer want feedback, that's fine. I can bring my
> experimentation with the 3.0 alpha to a close.
>
> Raymond
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