question of style

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:56:40 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

>> Well I wouldn't know, I've been fortunate enough to program mostly in
>> python for over half a decade now and None and 0 are as close as I've
>> gotten to NULL in a long time.
> 
> Right, and how many times have you had to debug
> 
>    AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'foo'

Hardly ever, and mostly when I do something silly like:

another_list = alist.sort()

Of course, YMMV.



> or the equivalent null pointer exceptions in Java, C, or whatever? They
> are very common.  And the basic idea is that if you avoid using null
> pointers in the first place, you'll get fewer accidental null pointer
> exceptions.

And some other error instead, due to the bugs in your more complicated 
code *wink*



-- 
Steven