Can a simple a==b 'hang' in and endless loop?

[Steve Holden]

Claudio Grondi wrote:
> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:25:38 +0100, Claudio Grondi
>><claudio.grondi at freenet.de> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Any hints towards enlightenment what this from the geometry known term 
>>>'ellipsis' mean in Python? Googling shows, that I am not the first who 
>>
>>
>>	Geometry: singular ellipse, plural ellipses -- sort of a flattened
>>circle
>>	Punctuation: singular ellipsis -- a mark (typically three ...,
>>typographically a single character "…") used to represent omitted text.
>>For example, trimming the middle of a quote, such as:
>>	"Any hints towards ... term 'ellipsis' mean in Python?"
>>
>>	In the case of python, you would have to examine slice notation and
>>some history...
>>
>>	Unless things have changed, nothing in the core Python language
>>/uses/ the ellipsis in slicing. It was added, apparently, for use in
>>numerical extension modules where the ellipsis represent
>>missing/unspecified array indices in an extended slice.
> 
> 
> As shown just above in this thread the code:
>  >>> a = [1]
>  >>> a.append(a)
>  >>> a
> [1, [...]]
> uses it, so it seems, that things have changed.
> 
Nope, that's just a linguistic snafu on my part. In English the term 
"ellipsis" describes "..." and means "Omission from a text of one or 
more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to 
make a construction grammatically correct". So I described the three 
dots as an ellipsis without reference to its meaning in Python.

I hope this hasn't seriously inconvenienced you. However, it does seem 
like you are "looking for trouble" here -- i.e. looking to prove that 
Python is broken, when what's actually broken appears to be *your 
understanding* of Python.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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