[Python-ideas] add a list.swap() method

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:37:36 am Kristján Valur Jónsson wrote:

> Since I started uncovering list bad-boys, I think perhaps list.pop()
> might be the evilest of the bunch in this context, since it does
> change the list length and so might crash unwary C extensions with
> some invariants.

True, the caller can shoot himself in the foot by bypassing your class 
and calling list.pop(instance) instead of instance.pop(). That's a bad 
thing, but probably unavoidable given Python's OO design. 

However, it's also a fairly unusual thing to do: like calling "private" 
double-underscore methods, anyone calling superclass.method(instance) 
instead of instance.method() will know that they're doing something 
unsupported and potentially dangerous.

Since we agree it's a bad thing, why do you want to copy it and create 
another method which is even more dangerous, by design?

As I see it, Python already has a perfectly good solution for swapping 
the contents of arbitrary mutable sequences, one which doesn't break 
any invariants: a[:], b[:] = b[:], a[:]

What you really want is a fast way of initialising a list, given another 
list. That was your use-case, after all. Swapping the contents is just 
one particular implementation of that fast-initialise.

I believe that the correct place for this is inside a list constructor, 
not as an external method which magically transports the internal data 
from one list into another. I suggested adding extra functionality to 
list.__new__, and Nick suggested a new constructor list.from_list(). 
Nick suggested making from_list destructive, but I don't see the 
advantage of doing so. I think this is a probably a more productive 
direction to take than a swap() method.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano