[Python-Dev] list.discard? (Re: dict.discard)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Sep 23 03:34:56 CEST 2006


skip at pobox.com wrote:

> It's obvious for sets and dictionaries that there is only one thing to
> discard and that after the operation you're guaranteed the key no longer
> exists.  Would you want the same semantics for lists or the semantics of
> list.remove where it only removes the first instance?

In my use cases I usually know that there is either
zero or one occurrences in the list.

But maybe it would be more useful to have a remove_all()
method, whose behaviour with zero occurrences would just
be a special case.

Or maybe remove() should just do nothing if the item is
not found. I don't think I've ever found getting an exception
from it to be useful, and I've often found it a nuisance.
What experiences have others had with it?

--
Greg


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