PEP0238 lament

Stephen Horne steve at lurking.demon.co.uk
Mon Jul 23 23:33:49 EDT 2001


On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 00:30:35 GMT, "Tim Hochberg"
<tim.hochberg at ieee.org> wrote:

>
>"David Eppstein" <eppstein at ics.uci.edu>:
>
>> Rather than arguing about nonexistent situations,
>
>Uhmm... didn't you ask for an example which I then provided. That hardly
>seems like a nonexistent situation.

You asked for a case where people want they same function to behave
fundamentally differently for different types. He rightly pointed out
that that is a nonexistent situation, and moved on to a real issue.
Apart from your snipping his context, what's the confusion?

>> let's make an analogy:
>> In Python, "123"+"456" = "123456" but 123+456=579.  These are two
>different
>> operators that happen to have the same symbol.  I really don't see why
>> integer-division and floating-point-division should be treated any
>> differently from this case.
>
>Because strings aren't numbers and integers are. This has three aspects:

To the total newbie, 123 as a string of digits is just as much a
number as 123 written as an integer or float representation - that is
why Perl does "1" / 3 -> 0.33333333333333.

One of the lessons a student needs to learn is that a string of
digits, while it may represent a number, is not a number in itself.
Python expects students to learn this. Is it the next thing we should
dumb down, do you think?

>All the other arguments I've heard come across as aimless thrashing. And as
>a result are very unlikely to influence those who you need to convince
>(which does not include me in case you hadn't figured that out).

But leaving an argument unanswered looks like an admition of its
validity.

Maybe we're both in a class of people who *must* have the last word -
after all, despite telling me to take a rest, *you* are still here ;-)

The people I need to convince are conspicuous by their general
silence. There's not much I can do about that - but I'm not going to
rejoin the silent Python-using majority and pretend there isn't a
problem.




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