append on lists

[J. Cliff Dyer]

On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 08:49 -0500, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2008-09-16, Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic at xemacs.org> wrote:
> > Duncan Booth <duncan.booth at invalid.invalid> writes:
> >
> >> The only relatively common use I can think of where you might want to call 
> >> a method directly on a literal is to produce a list of strings while being 
> >> lazy about the typing:
> >
> > By far the most common is probably 'sep'.join(iterable).
> 
> It's also somewhat common to index into a literal:
> 
>  ['one','two','three'][n]
> 
>  {1:'one', 2:'two', 7:'seven'}[n]
> 

Indeed.  I use this for setting variables based on hostname on a
website.  Say, for example, you run on port 80 on one host, but on a
test host, you share with several other sites, and run on 8084, you can
do the following

import socket

port = { 
    'www.example.com': 80,
    'dev.example.com': 8084,
}[socket.gethostname()]

It's a handy idiom.

Cheers,
Cliff