[Python-Dev] School IIb?

[Fredrik Lundh]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

>> that's not true for all programming languages that has a switch construct, though;
>> the common trait is that you're dispatching on a single value, not necessarily that
>> there cannot be potentially overlapping case conditions.
>
> You have a point.

that can happen to the best of us ;-)

> Suppose you're switching on some os-specific constants (e.g. exported
> by the os module or some module like that). You have a case for each.
> But on some os, two different constants have the same value (since on
> that os they are implemented the same way -- like O_TEXT and O_BINARY
> on Unix). Now your switch wouldn't work at all on that os; it would be
> much better if you could arrange the cases so that one case has
> preference over another.
>
> There's also the (more likely) use case where you have a set of cases
> to be treated the same, but one member of the set must be treated
> differently. It would be convenient to put the exception in an earlier
> case and be done with it.

same approach as for try/except, in other words.

> Yet, it seems a shame not to be able to diagnose dead code due to
> accidental case duplication. Maybe that's less important, and
> pychecker can deal with it? After all we don't diagnose duplicate
> method definitions either, and that must have bitten many of us
> (usually due to a copy-and-paste error)...

we could use a warning for this...

> This doesn't move me to school I. But I do want to introduce school
> IIb which resolves redundant cases by saying the first match wins.
> This is trivial to implement when building the dispatch dict (skip
> keys already present).

I just wish I could figure out what school my original micro-PEP belongs
to (but as long as my implementation note is still just a draft, I guess no-
body else can figure that out either... ;-)

</F>