Newbie Questions: Swithing from Perl to Python

[Geoff Gerrietts]

Quoting Todd Stephens (huzzah at tampabay.rr.com):
>  
> Thanks for the info.  Knowing that the Python community prefers one
> correct way to do something, can you explain to me how this is
> different/incorrect? :

I think the only danger with your solution is that you're relying on
the implicit behavior in the coerce-dictionary-to-list. When you ask a
dictionary for its keys, it's a little clearer what you're after. In
your example, if I didn't know already that list(myD) returned a list
of the keys, I would hafta wonder: is it a list of keys? A list of
values? A list of (key, value) tuples? In other words, you're
sacrificing some readability.

I'm not sure if the mapping interface requires implementations to
return the keys in the event of a coerce-to-list. If it does, then
there's no other weakness. If it doesn't, you may also be sacrificing
some of this construct's portability.

--G.

-- 
Geoff Gerrietts <geoff at gerrietts dot net>       http://www.gerrietts.net/
karma police arrest this man he speaks in maths -- Radiohead, "Karma Police"