[Python-ideas] Default return values to int and float

[Jan Kaliszewski]

Guido van Rossum dixit (2011-10-04, 19:21):

> Other ideas: returning some more structured object than an integer
> (like re.match does) feels like overkill, and returning an (index,
> success) tuple is begging for lots of mysterious occurrences of [0] or
> [1].

A lightweight builtin type whose instances would have `index` attribute
might do the job well (together with None as not-found).

A naive pure-Python implementation:

    class Found(object):
        __slots__ = 'index',
        def __init__(self, index):
            self.index = index

Example usage:
    
    found = s.find('foo')
    if found:  # or more explicit: `if found is not None:`
        print('foo found at %d' % found.index)
    else:
        # found is None
        print('foo not found')

Of course that would be probably a new method, not str.find(), say:
str.search().  Then it could be possible to make it a bit more
universal, accepting substring tuples (as startswith/endswith
already do):

Example usage:

    one_of = 'foo', 'bar', 'baz'
    found = s.search(one_of)
    if found:
        print('%s found at %d' % (found.substring, found.index))
    else:
        print('None of %s found' % one_of)

The 4th line could be respelled as:

        index, substring = found
        print('%s found at %d' % (substring, index))

A naive implementation of s.search() result type:

    class Found(object):
        __slots__ = 'index', 'substring'
        def __init__(self, index, substring):
            self.index = index
            self.substring = substring
        def __iter__(self):
            yield self.index
            yield self.substring

Cheers,
*j