[Python-ideas] Another use case for the 'lazy' (aka 'delayed') keyword

[MRAB]

On 2017-02-28 12:04, Michel Desmoulin wrote:
> The debate on the 'lazy' keyword seems to have settled, but I don't know
> if somebody is trying to write a PEP about it.
>
> Anyway, I was doing something like this the other day:
>
> conf.get('setting_name', load_from_db('setting_name'))
>
> And then realized I could save a query not doing the load_from_db() call
> most of the time.
>
> But dict.get didn't accept callable so I couldn't do:
>
> conf.get('setting_name', lambda key: load_from_db('setting_name'))
>
> Which is standard practice in a lot of popular Python libs on Pypi.
>
> Instead I did:
>
> val = conf.get('setting_name')
> if val is None:
>     val = load_from_db('setting_name')
>
> Which is way more verbose. It also has a bug if None is a valid
> configuration value or if I expect my code to be thread safe.
>
[snip]

If None is a valid value, then use a sentinel:

MISSING = object()
val = conf.get('setting_name', MISSING)
if val is MISSING:
     val = load_from_db('setting_name')