[Tutor] permutations?

[Alex Hall]

Thanks, everyone! While I do not understand the function provided a
few messages back, it works perfectly. The rest of the responses were
very interesting. I need to try, yet again, to really understand list
comprehensions, possibly the most difficult topic I have yet come
across, along with the colon when used in lists.
Thanks again to all!

On 12/2/10, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Alan Gauld wrote:
>>
>> "Alex Hall" <mehgcap at gmail.com> wrote
>>
>>> Alright, I have it working. Now the problem is that it does not throw
>>> out reversals. I tried to do this myself with a couple loops, but I
>>> get index errors. My total list of permutations is called l.
>>>
>>> for i in range(0, len(l)):
>>> r=l[i]; r.reverse()
>>
>> You don''t need to specify the 0, its the default.
>> But you don't need to use indexing either.
>>
>> for r,i in enumerate(l): r.reverse()
>>
>>> for j in range(0, len(l)):
>>>  print l[j], r, i, j
>>
>> Here you are comparing the reversed item to every item in the
>> list, including the ones you have already reversed, including the
>> item itself. So you will always find a match when i==j...
>>
>> Using the in operator and list slicing would be easier
>>
>> if r in l[i:]: l.remove(r)
>>
>> but...
>>
>>>  if r==l[j]: l.remove(r)
>>
>> Its never a good idea to remove items from a list you are iterating
>> over, its like the old cartoon of the guy cutting down the tree branch
>> he is sitting on.
>
> You can cut off the branch you're sitting on so long as you remember to
> cut on the correct side :)
>
> Back in Ancient Days when dinosaurs walked the earth, and I programmed
> in Pascal, computers didn't have much memory, and were slow.
> Consequently it wasn't practical to make a copy of a list if you wanted
> to delete a few items. The only practical way to modify lists was to
> modify them in place, and if you needed to delete items, you had to work
> backwards. It took me a while to break myself of the habit of doing this:
>
> for i in range(len(mylist)-1, -1, -1):
>      if mylist[i] == "something":
>           del mylist[i]
>
> (Note that you only need to work backwards if you're *deleting* entries,
> not if you replace them with something else.)
>
> This is still a useful technique to have in your toolbox, but generally
> speaking the above is better written as:
>
> mylist = [x for x in mylist if x != "something"]
>
>
> If you really need to modify the list in place, and not just re-bind the
> name "mylist" to the new list, then one tiny change will do it:
>
> mylist[:] = [x for x in mylist if x != "something"]
>
>
>
> --
> Steven
>
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-- 
Have a great day,
Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
mehgcap at gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap