[Python-ideas] clear() method for lists

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Raymond Hettinger
<raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> ISTM, the language moratorium would preclude this change.

Oops, you're right. Scratch the go-ahead. :-(

While PEP 3003 allows case-by-case exemptions for adding methods to
built-in objects, I think this isn't one of those cases, since the
work-around sure is simple enough, and has been in the language for 20
years now. ;-)

> Also, since it doesn't actually add any new functionality,
> it is more of a documentation issue, teaching basic python idioms:
>
>    del s[:]
> or
>    s[:] = []

Though it's a common-enough special case that it shouldn't need slice
manipulations, which are a bit of an acquired taste. I probably would
have added this if I'd anticipated dict.clear(), which wasn't always
part of the language.

--Guido

> Raymond
>
> On Feb 5, 2010, at 11:39 AM, Gerald Britton wrote:
>
>> In the list archives, this thread
>>
>>    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2009-April/003897.html
>>
>> discusses adding a clear() method to list objects, to complement those
>> available for sets and dictionaries.  Later in the thread:
>>
>>    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2009-April/003933.html
>>
>> Christian Heimes provided a patch to do it and R. H. commented that
>> all it would take is Guido's blessing.
>>
>> So, I'm wondering, can we do this?  What are the steps needed to ask
>> this work to be blessed?
>>
>> --
>> Gerald Britton
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)