Confused again

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Duncan Smith:
> I'm still (again) having a little trouble with operator overloading.  I
> changed the original code I posted yesterday (Confusing problem) so that it
> now (apparently) does what I want.  I simply changed "def __cmp__(self,
> other):" to "def __eq__(self, other):".  [...]

This has nothing to do with your problem below, but you probably
also want to provide __ne__.  Notice:
    >>> class spam(object):
    ...     def __eq__(self, other):
    ...             return 1 # all spams are created equal
    ... 
    >>> a = spam()
    >>> b = spam()
    >>> a == b
    1
    >>> a != b
    1
Users of spam might be confused by this behaviour.

What's happening is that spam has no __ne__, so != falls back to
... an implementation that tests 'is not same object', I think. 
(Certainly a != a yields 0.)  In any case, it doesn't do what you
want.  Adding, for example,
    def __ne__(self, other):
        return not self == other
will suffice (unless you're using NotImplemented tricks in __eq__).

> [...] But if I try to raise an exception
> after calling the function, the exception is apparently ignored.  eg. the
> following code snippet,
> 
>         print table == numtable2
>         if table == numtable2:
>             to_remove.append(table)
>         else:
>             print 'what?'
>             raise Error
> 
> class Error:
>     pass
> 
> 
> >>> c.clusters[(3,)].pruneTables()
> 0                                # evaluates to false as expected
> what?                         # prints 'what?' OK
> >>>                           # but no error

Puzzling.  What's the rest of pruneTables()?

-- 
Steven Taschuk                                                 o- @
staschuk at telusplanet.net                                      7O   )
                                                               "  (