Comparisons and sorting of a numeric class....

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com>:

>> An advantage of the Scheme way is the chaining of "and" and "or". For
>> example, this breaks in Python:
>>
>>    def dir_contents(path):
>>        if os.path.isdir(path):
>>            return os.listdir(path)
>>        return None
>>
>>    def get_choices():
>>        return dir_contents(PRIMARY) or \
>>            dir_contents(SECONDARY) or \
>>            [ BUILTIN_PATH ]
>
> That depends on what the function is intended to do in the first
> place. Why would you want to return the contents of an empty directory
> rather than the default?

To demonstrate the principle. Such short-circuited expressions have
spread to numerous high-level programming languages. Python has them,
too, but you have to be extra careful not to be hit by the surprising
false interpretations.

> Anyway, to make that work as you want it in Scheme, dir_contents would
> have to return #f, not None. Does it really make sense for a
> non-predicate function to be returning the value "false"?

By custom, #f acts as the de-facto None of Scheme for that very reason.
In classic Lisp, nil takes the roles of None, False and [], leading to
the confusion I mentioned.

Of course, Scheme now has to deal with distinguishing None (#f) and
False (#f as well). Luckily, that confusion rarely comes to play.


Marko