determining the number of output arguments

[Alex Martelli]

Fernando Perez <fperez528 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> > Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:
> 
> >> But then again, I don't much like extended list slicing (I generally
> >> only use the L[:y], L[x:] and L[x:y]  versions).
> > 
> > It may be that in your specific line of work there is no opportunity or
> > usefulness for the stride argument.  Statistically, however, it's
> 
> Indeed, those of us from the Numeric/numarray side of things rely every
> day on extended slicing, and consider it an absolute necessity for writing
> compact, clean, readable numerical python code.
> 
> It's no surprise that this syntax (as far as I know) originated from the
> needs of the scientific computing community, a group where python is
> picking up users every day.

Definitely no suprise to me -- although I didn't come to Python by way
of scientific programming, I do have a solid background in that field,
and the concept of addressing an array with a stride is very obvious to
me.  Indeed, I was disappointed, early on, that lists didn't support
extended slicing, and very happy when we were able to add it to them.


Alex