Death to tuples!

[Antoon Pardon]

On 2005-11-30, Christophe <chris.cavalaria at free.fr> wrote:
> Antoon Pardon a écrit :
>> On 2005-11-30, Duncan Booth <duncan.booth at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> 
>>>Antoon Pardon wrote:
>>>
>>>>But lets just consider. Your above code could simply be rewritten
>>>>as follows.
>>>>
>>>>  res = list()
>>>>  for i in range(10):
>>>>     res.append(i*i)
>>>>
>>>
>>>I don't understand your point here? You want list() to create a new list 
>>>and [] to return the same (initially empty) list throughout the run of the 
>>>program?
>> 
>> 
>> No, but I think that each occurence returning the same (initially empty)
>> list throughout the run of the program would be consistent with how
>> default arguments are treated.
>
> What about that :
> def f(a):
>      res = [a]
>      return res
>
> How can you return the same list that way ? Do you propose to make such 
> construct illegal ?

I don't propose anything. This is AFAIC just a philosophical
exploration about the cons and pros of certain python decisions.

To answer your question. The [a] is not a constant list, so
maybe it should be illegal. The way python works now each list
is implicitely constructed. So maybe it would have been better
if python required such a construction to be made explicit.

If people would have been required to write:

  a = list()
  b = list()

Instead of being able to write

  a = []
  b = []

It would have been clearer that a and b are not the same list.

-- 
Antoon Pardon