[Python-ideas] PEP 505 vs matrix multiplication

[Nick Coghlan]

On 2 December 2017 at 00:16, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> At the moment, 99% of the discussion seems rooted in generalised "it
> would help a lot of code" with readability arguments based on
> artificial examples, and that's not really helping move the discussion
> forward.

PEP 505 covers this in
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0505/#motivating-examples (with an
actual survey of standard library code, as well as some specific
motivating examples from real world open source projects).

>
> To be clear, I understand the problem of reading semi-structured data.
> I've hit it myself and been frustrated by it. But my reaction was "why
> am I not able to find a library that does this?", and when I couldn't
> find such a library, my assumption was that people in general don't
> find the current behaviour sufficiently frustrating to do anything
> about it. And I was in the same situation - it annoys me, but not
> enough to write a helper module (and certainly not enough that I'm
> crying out for a language change). So I do appreciate the need, I just
> don't think "language change" should be the first thing that's
> suggested.

The problem is that libraries don't have any way to manipulate
attribute access chains in a usefully relevant way - you either have
to put the control flow logic in line, or start writing helper
functions like:

   def maybe_traverse_particular_subtree(obj):
       if obj is None:
           return None
       return obj.particular.subtree.of.interest

And there are lots of other tricks used to make such code reasonably
readable, with one of the most common being "Use a short placeholder
variable name", so you get code like:


        fs = site.first_seen
        first_seen = fs if fs is None else fs.isodate()

(from one of the proposed refactorings of the SiteView example in the PEP)

Another variant on the "?? as pronoun" idea would be to use it as a
new syntax for defining single argument lambda expressions:

    def call_if_not_none(lhs, deferred_rhs):
        return lhs if lhs is not None else deferred_rhs(lhs)


    first_seen = call_if_not_none(site.first_seen, (??.isodate())

However, I think that would actually be less clear and more confusing
than the inline implicit pronoun idea.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia