copy on write
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Thu Feb 2 04:16:40 EST 2012
On Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:11:53 +1100, John O'Hagan wrote:
> You're right, in fact, for me the surprise is that "t[1] +=" is
> interpreted as an assignment at all, given that for lists (and other
> mutable objects which use "+=") it is a mutation. Although as Steven
> says elsewhere, it actually is an assignment, but one which ends up
> reassigning to the same object.
>
> But it shouldn't be both.
Do you expect that x += 1 should succeed? After all, "increment and
decrement numbers" is practically THE use-case for the augmented
assignment operators.
How can you expect x += 1 to succeed without an assignment? Numbers in
Python are immutable, and they have to stay immutable. It would cause
chaos and much gnashing of teeth if you did this:
x = 2
y = 7 - 5
x += 1
print y * 100
=> prints 300
So if you want x += 1 to succeed, += must do an assignment.
Perhaps you are thinking that Python could determine ahead of time
whether x[1] += y involved a list or a tuple, and not perform the finally
assignment if x was a tuple. Well, maybe, but such an approach (if
possible!) is fraught with danger and mysterious errors even harder to
debug than the current situation. And besides, what should Python do
about non-built-in types? There is no way in general to predict whether
x[1] = something will succeed except to actually try it.
> I can't think of another example of (what
> appears to be but is not) a single operation failing with an exception,
> but still doing exactly what you intended.
Neither can I, but that doesn't mean that the current situation is not
the least-worst alternative.
>> I can't think of any way out of this misleadingness, although if you
>> can that would be pretty awesome.
>
> In the case above, the failure of the assignment is of no consequence. I
> think it would make more sense if applying "+=" to a tuple element were
> treated (by the interpreter I suppose) only on the merits of the
> element, and not as an assignment to the tuple.
How should the interpreter deal with other objects which happen to raise
TypeError? By always ignoring it?
x = [1, None, 3]
x[1] += 2 # apparently succeeds
Or perhaps by hard-coding tuples and only ignoring errors for tuples? So
now you disguise one error but not others?
--
Steven
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