new linereading standard?

[Johann Hibschman]

Robin Becker writes:

> am I wrong for writing

> for line in open('myfile.txt').readlines():
>     print line

Of course not!  Wrongness is such a relative thing that no one,
especially inhuman compilers, clearly cannot judge it.  If it seems
right to you, that is all that matters.

<wink>

But seriously, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
It depends on what you're doing.  You can get away with a lot of
syntax crunching if what you're doing is basically simple.  That
code fits the basically simple criteria in my brain.

In short, looks fine to me, and I do it a lot, when all I need from a
file is a list of lines in order.


ObComplexity:

To go off on a wild tangent, this reminds me of the whole map/lambda
functional programming fracas.  See, I agree with most people that I
don't really want to see code like

  map(lambda s: string.split(string.strip(s), ',')[0],
      open('data.dat').readlines())

I much prefer

  out = []
  for s in open('data.dat').readlines():
     fields = string.split(string.strip(s), ',')
     out.append(fields[0])

But, if I'm doing this at the interactive prompt, what I end up typing
is most often something like:

>>> lines = open('data.dat').readlines()
>>> lines = map(string.strip, lines)
>>> lines = map(lambda l: string.split(l, ','), lines)
>>> out   = map(lambda fs: fs[0], lines)

So, basically, I find the functional stuff much more useful from
the command line than I do from actual programs.  I think of the
right transform, then I apply it.  Interesting.

Heh.  I'm free-associating here, please bear with me. Anyone else have
this experience?

--Johann

-- 
Johann Hibschman                           johann at physics.berkeley.edu