automatic type conversion for comparison operators

[Dan Bishop]

On Jul 26, 6:22 pm, Russ <uymqlp... at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> I posted a message on this several days ago, but it apparently got
> lost
> in googlespace, so I'll try it again.
>
> I recently discovered a bug in my code that apparently resulted from
> the automatic conversion of a function pointer to an integer.
>
> Say you have a class member function called getCount(), which
> returns an integer. Now suppose you write something like
>
> if obj.getCount < 3: ...
>
> This is an error because the parentheses were left off.

BTW, are you a former Pascal programmer?

> But Python
> somehow compares the function pointer with an integer without
> complaining. Unless there is a darn good reason for allowing
> comparisons of this type (and I can't think of one), I think
> Python should flag this as an Exception.

IIRC, the reason is for backwards compatibility with a long-obsolete
version of Python in which it wasn't possible for __cmp__ to throw an
exception.  That's not darn good, so this behavior is already slated
for removal in version 3.0.