[Python-ideas] list…pushed, or something

[Shane Green]

Yes, these are good points.  To be clear about one thing, though, what I was suggesting behaves very differently than the mechanism most other languages may use to enable chaining.  Chaining is usually based around the operations on X, returning a reference to X after completion (of course this only makes sense for mutator methods, otherwise nothing would been done or gotten).  

Given my recommendation: 
	X.pushed(Y) -> X IFF (and-only-if) Y is X.

However, 
	X.pushed(Y) -> Y is always true.  

The idea was not to be able chain invocations, but to be able to use theses operations inline in places the plain value, Y, would have appeared.  It's such a trivial matter it's almost moot point anyhow...




The only time "list.puhed(x)" wou
On Mar 29, 2013, at 4:40 AM, Joao S. O. Bueno <jsbueno at python.org.br> wrote:

> On 27 March 2013 23:29, Shane Green <shane at umbrellacode.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure if there's anything inherently wrong with this idea, and I am
>> well aware how incredibly easy it is to implement as an extension of the
>> built-ins, but, I find it very useful to have variations of
>> list().append(obj) and set().add(obj) that return, obj.  I've never come up
>> with perfect method names; sometimes I go with past-tense versions, "added"
>> and "appended" (or "pushed").  I often use these methods in places where
>> performance is  a factor, such as using a set() to filter repeats from an
>> input sequence.
>> 
>> I was thinking it may be worth considering adding it to core, or perhaps
>> creating collections types with these features, so they are high performance
>> and standardized.  They can be particularly useful in generator recipes,
>> etc.
> 
> I understand that the equivalent methods in other languages - sometimes
> frameworks int hose languages  - allow one to chain method calls on the
> parent object, so they can happly write things along:
> 
> list().append(1).append(0).sort().append(2)
> 
> Python style, as well placed on the thread is that methods that perform
> changes to the underlying object return None, thus not allowing
> such constructs to mutable objects - even though one can happily
> do something like:
> 
> image_name = url.split("/")[-1].split(".")[0]
> 
> You can easily have the former behavior if you wrap your object
> in a construct that, whenever a called method would return "None",
> returns the original object itself. That could be placed in a utility
> module - and probably there is even some "MyHacks" package on
> pypi with functionality like that.
> 
> If a naive implementation fits your needs, this one would work:
> 
> 
> class Chain:
>    def __init__(self, obj, root=None):
>        self.__obj = obj
>    def __getattr__(self, attr):
>        val = getattr(self.__obj, attr)
>        if callable(val):
>            self.__callable = val
>            return self
>        return val
>    def __call__(self, *args, **kw):
>        val = self.__callable(*args, **kw)
>        if val is None:
>            return self
>        return val
> 
> ---------------
>>>> a = []
>>>> Chain(a).append(5).append(6).append(-1).sort().append(3)
> <__main__.Chain object at 0x12b6f50>
>>>> a
> [-1, 5, 6, 3]
> 
> 
> I'd be -0 for something like that on the stlib, though - but if it was there,
> I'd look around "functools" (but it is obviously more like an "objecttool")
> 
> 
>  js
> -><-