[Python-Dev] unscriptable?

[Georg Brandl]

Steven schrieb:
> On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:13:19 +1000
> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Being indexable is subtly different from being subscriptable - the 
>> former has stronger connotations of numeric indices and sequence-like 
>> behaviour 
> 
> I dispute this. Indices aren't necessarily numeric (think of an A-Z 
> file), and I don't believe you are correct about the connotations of
> indexable being numeric or sequence-like. Think of index cards. 

In normal language use, perhaps -- I'm no native speaker. But in the
Python world, Nick is right -- think of the __index__ special method that
adapts the object to a sequence index; it has to return an integer.

> With my maths background, I would expect that subscripts are (almost)
> always numeric, e.g. x-subscript-i means the i-th x value, where i 
> is a natural number.

Maths background isn't always directly transferable to computer
languages. Think 1 / 2 == 0 -- with terms, it's even worse.

An interesting point here is that the special methods are called
__getitem__ et al., smartly evading the problem. "'int' object
has no items" sounds equally strange to me though.

> +0 on keeping unsubscriptable.
> +1 on changing it to unidexable.
> -1 on keeping the current misspelling.

There is currently no misspelling.

Georg

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