how to get the ordinal number in list
Rustom Mody
rustompmody at gmail.com
Sun Aug 10 23:35:24 EDT 2014
On Monday, August 11, 2014 3:31:08 AM UTC+5:30, Roy Smith wrote:
> Mark Lawrence wrote:
> > On 10/08/2014 19:26, Rustom Mody wrote:
> > > Its when we have variables that are assigned in multiple places that
> > > we start seeing mathematical abominations like
> > > x = x+1
> > I'm not bothered about it being a mathematical or any other type of
> > abomination. It works, practically beats purity, so if it ain't broke,
> > please don't fix it, for some definition of fix.
> I'm with Mark. This isn't math, it's programming. Sure, the
> intersection of the two is non-null, but they are different things.
> I'll often do things like:
> for line in input:
> line = line.strip()
> # do more stuff
So would I
> Sure, I could invent some other variable name to avoid re-using the same
> name, but does:
> for line in input:
> stripped_line = line.strip()
> # do more stuff
> really make this any easier to read or understand? I think not.
You are switching between software-engineer and teacher hat.
As a software engineer you (and I and possibly most reasonable people)
would do things like that.
As a teacher when you introduce problematic concepts you have to answer
questions -- possibly embarrassing -- about them.
Just as parents need to talk of 'birds-and-bees' to their children
sometime but also need good sense and judgement as to when, likewise
teachers should deliver maturity-building easier stuff before
maturity-needing harder ideas.
Assignment is definitely in the latter category because we have to
talk of time, environments and so on. When one explicates (and not
handwaves) these pre-requisites -- as happens in denotational
semantics or in any language implementation -- then assignment is seen
to be as higher-order a concept as any other 2 level lambda expression.
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