Newbie: finding the key/index of the min/max element

[Alex Martelli]

On Thursday 02 May 2002 06:23, James J. Besemer wrote:
> Alex Martelli wrote:
> > Actually, _I_ wouldn't mind it if there was a way to discourage people
> > from starting Yet Another Round of language-change proposals or whines
> > and complaints against some aspect of the language they have not
> > carefully considered.
>
> It strikes me as somewhat arbitrary that "newbie" questions or comments
> about language features are so irritating while answering newbie
> questions over and over about how to split a text line into fields (or to
> measure performance) is not.
> IMHO, they both seem legitimate questions.

As I said quite clearly, I do consider all _questions_ legitimate.  How 
exactly some language feature works, how come something works that
way.  The "how" is clearly important to know, and understanding the "why"
helps a lot in using the language well.  Complaining and proposing changes
without understanding is what irks _me_, personally (first person singular:
note in the above-quoted paragraph how I emphasized this as my own,
individual opinion).

It may well be (in the abstract) that somebody else is bored to death of
helping people use Python effectively but looking forwards to a renewed
debate pro or con (e.g.) switch statements, repeat/until loops, goto
statements, ternary operators, assignment-in-expressions, variable
declarations, and so on, and so forth.  I have my doubts, but I cannot
rule it out.


> For the record, I did not initiate any of these language extension
> topics. I only joined in after someone else put them into play.

For the record, my personal distaste is for complaining and proposing
changes (outside of the recognized PEP process), not for initiating
a thread by asking about the how or why of any feature or lack
thereof.


> A traditional solution for this would be for someone to write and
> maintain a FAQ for the list.  By tradition, list FAQs can prominently
> feature a list of arbitrary topics that are strictly off limits.  New
> members can be pointed to the FAQ and people who willfully disregard the
> FAQ can be dealt with.

http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html does a decent job, IMHO -- e.g.,
see http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html#4.16 -- but it's about Python
itself, not about this newsgroup/mailing-list.  There is no "arbitrary
topic that is strictly off limits" AFAIK (except of course the PSU, which
fortunately doesn't exist).  Maybe FAQs 2.5-2.7 could do a better
job of spelling out that PEPs are THE way to propose changes to
Python and that the PEP archive lists many proposals that were
already made and rejected (including reasons for rejection -- alas,
those aren't often optimally expressed).


> Finally, there's the issue of once taboo topics that become language
> features.  If "bool" had been listed as a taboo topic perhaps the
> corresponding PEP would never have been written (for better or worse,

That was a PEP by GvR himself, Python's BDFL, so I find it mildly
amusing to suppose he might let something as trivial as a FAQ
inhibit his creative instincts.


Alex