Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:57:35 -0800, Steve Howell wrote:

> The names you give to the intermediate results here are terse--"tuples"
> and "filtered"--so your code reads nicely.
> 
> In a more real world example, the intermediate results would be
> something like this:
> 
>    departments
>    departments_in_new_york
>    departments_in_new_york_not_on_bonus_cycle
>    employees_in_departments_in_new_york_not_on_bonus_cycle
>    names_of_employee_in_departments_in_new_york_not_on_bonus_cycle

Those last two could be written more concisely as:

serfs_in_new_york
names_of_serfs_in_new_york_as_if_we_cared

But seriously... if you have a variable called "departments_in_new_york", 
presumably you also have variables called "departments_in_washington", 
"departments_in_los_angeles", "departments_in_houston", 
"departments_in_walla_walla", and so forth. If so, this is a good sign 
that you are doing it wrong and you need to rethink your algorithm.



-- 
Steven