[Python-ideas] Integrate some itertools into the Python syntax

[Mark Lawrence]

On 23/03/2016 23:00, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Mar 23, 2016, at 15:01, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> The advantage of having a small set of builtins is that you know the entire
>>>> set of builtins.
>>>
>>> Python 3.6 has len(dir(builtins))==150, which is hardly small. Even
>>> removing the ones that don't begin with a lower-case letter (which
>>> removes a small number of special names like __package__, and a large
>>> number of exception classes) leaves 72. Can you name them all?
>>
>> Can you name all 25000 words of English that you know?
>>
>> There are 68 builtins listed in a nice table at the top of the builtin functions chapter in the docs. Take a look at that table. They're all (except maybe format and iter[1]) functions[2] that you can immediately recognize them when reading them, and recall when they're relevant to code you're writing, including know exactly what their interface is and what they do. If you see "any()" or "int()" in code, you don't need to turn to the docs to look up what it does. If you need to convert something to a debug string representation, you know to call "repr()". The fact that you might leave out "any", "int", or "repr" in a pop quiz demanding that you list all 68 of them in alphabetical order doesn't mean you don't know them.
>>
>> You certainly can't say the same is true for all functions and methods in the stdlib.
>
> Fair enough, naming them all is a poor definition of "know". But the
> flip side (knowing what one means when you meet it) is also a poor
> definition. The real trick is knowing, when you're faced with a
> problem, what the solution is; and while most people here will be able
> to do that, I'm not sure that every Python programmer can. Some
> builtins are well known, like int and len; others, not so much - zip,
> hash, divmod. And then there are some (compile, bytearray, callable)
> that, if they were elsewhere in the stdlib, would barely change
> people's code. How many non-experts know exactly which function
> decorators are builtins and which are imported from functools? If you
> have to look them up, (a) there's not a lot of difference between
> built-in and stdlib, and (b) the builtins are already a bit crowded.
>
> My conclusion: itertools.chain is just as discoverable as
> builtins.chain, so the only real benefit would be playing around at
> the interactive prompt, which you can improve on with an auto script.
> -0.5 on making chain a builtin.
>
> ChrisA

My conclusion is RTFM.

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence