Coolest Python recipe of all time

[Raymond Hettinger]

On May 2, 10:04 pm, Stefan Behnel <stefan... at behnel.de> wrote:
> The bad thing about this recipe is that it requires quite a bit of
> background knowledge in order to infer that the code the developer is
> looking at is actually correct. At first sight, it looks like an evil hack,
> and the lack of documentation doesn't help either.

The recipe is cool in the same way that a magic trick is cool.

A practical recipe would use a more general purpose method (perhaps
using finite differences or continued fractions); it would have
documentation and tests; it would accept a regular python function
instead of a string; and it would avoid an unsanitized eval().  But
then it would completely lose its panache, its flourish, and the
pleasant gratification that you get when solving the riddle of how it
works.

We should have a separate thread for the most practical, best
documented, least surprising, and most boring recipe ;-)


Raymond