2.3 list reverse() bug?

[Bjorn Pettersen]

[posted and mailed]

Arthur <ajsiegel at optonline.com> wrote in
news:t0houvc69mtnlrmamh3klgvui8mbf1eu5t at 4ax.com: 

[...]

> But this is also my approach, I guess. Not exactly writing Universe
> Critical code, I tend to proceed with a light reading of the docs, and
> learn by having my naive intuitions corrected - as necessary when
> necessary, by finding something broken.

My late boss approached languages and other problems the same way, and I 
never could understand how he dealt with what for me would be continous 
frustration. He seemed to have no problems with it though -- allthough 
there was the "what do you mean Python doesn't have a case statement?" 
meltdown that almost lead to an in-house Python dialect *eek*... Now, I'm 
not against a case statement in Python per se, but until one has 
experienced pattern matching in SML, one can't understand how inadequate 
the Pascal/C case/switch statements are -- and I _am_ against C style 
switches in Python (... and we all know how much my vote counts <grin>).

I'm more the kind of person that reads the user's manual to the VCR before 
ever putting a tape in (did I just date myself?). Doing language theory in 
grad school, while not always the most immediately useful, is a wonderful 
way to develop passionate ideas about how things ought to be (you should 
have heard the lunch discussions when Java came out <grin>).

> But there is I feel a valid point implicit in my original question.  
> 
> The "I have been using Python 42 years and never imported copy" is a
> very ambiguous assertion,made time and again.

You're most certainly correct, although I don't believe it was very 
ambigous when I stated it. If you look at my response to Alex, you'll see 
that I really do mean that copies are virtually never needed [in the 
aesthetic, not the Turing complete sense], and if you do use them you're 
likely to (a) do more work, sometimes potentially _much_ more work, (b) 
complexificate the algorithm making it harder to visually verify, (c) make 
it _much_ harder to _prove_ correct, and (d) you're adding another entity 
that you'll have to keep in memory when you're visualizing the system.

[digressing, I never thought I'd feel the need to do algorithmic proofs 
until I started working for the people who give you your FICO score. The 
thought that we measure personal information in (a lot of) Tera-bytes, that 
we can store over 4000 individual pieces of data about a person and that a 
bug could make someones life severly miserable.. No wonder that for such a 
mission critical subsystem as the 'data-structure' managing this 
information we wouldn't use anything but a Python code generator, 
generating over 380KLoc of C++ code, SQL schemas and stored procs, etc.)].

Getting back to my point about copies, it is almost purely an aesthetic 
issue. You can get working code while creating copies all over the place 
without too much effort. If getting the code to work is the final goal, 
there is no place for what I call "clean" code. For me, working code hasn't 
been very exciting, probably since I saw the BSD sources long ago and was 
utterly flummoxed when the pinnacle of what I considered a big, complex 
"program" was easier to understand than what I was writing. I was 
immediately convinced that only clean code can be good code, and only good 
code can create exceptional systems. Being an aestethic quality, crafting 
clean code is more art than engineering, but listening to coders around me 
who wrote good code, and my own trial and error, I have no problem 
categorically denouncing the creation of copies.

I can also categorically say that it's a really bad idea to walk to the 
middle of a bridge, precariously climb up on the railing, before doing a 
swan dive towards the dry riverbed several hundred feet below... but it's 
really fun if you have a bungie-cord attached.

I haven't encountered any rules that didn't come with their own list of 
exceptions. However, while the exceptions _are_ important, focusing on them  
is perhaps misplaced. Taking an extra look when you're creating a copy has 
an amazing track record in languages with gc... as does removing functions 
bigger than 25x80, more than two levels of nested loops in a function, more 
than two sequential loops in a function, more than three levels of 
inheritance, almost all cases of multiple inheritance, classes with more 
than a dozen methods, inconsistent use of whitespace, etc., etc.

Sure it is weird to want to think of such trivialities when the code is 
working, but clean code makes me happy <smile>, and hey, after 20+ years of 
programming, I'm still excited when I go to work and I still program after 
I come home...

I hope you don't take my verbose mode as any kind of criticism -- while I 
have no problem voicing my opinion about how things should be, I never 
presume to tell someone else what to do (no desire, besides friends who 
disagree with me are much more interesting ;-)   I sincerely do not grasp 
mentally however, how some people can "break path" in a new domain guided 
mainly by their intuition? My intuition definitely doesn't work at that 
level :-)  If you have any meta-analysis it would be very interesting to 
contemplate...

[...]

> Don't we need to pick one meaning for that assertion? Or make the
> meaning clear, when asserted.

Of course not, this is USENET <wink>. I was going to put something here 
about the quote from Winnie the Pooh about "when I say ___ I mean ___", but 
googling for "Winnie the Poo" is not something anyone should do before 
lunch... seriously.

Anyways, God Jul og Godt Nytt År allesammen,
-- Bjørn Steinar