Why does list have no 'get' method?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

bearophileHUGS at lycos.com a écrit :
> Steven D'Aprano:
>> With the greatest respect, I think that if you think the second example
>> "is more clear", you're completely bonkers. *grins*
> 
> No one is completely normal, I presume :-)
> I'd like to know what others think about it, about this anti-feature.

s/anti//

> What I can say is that other computer languages too think that boolean
> operations must return boolean values only,

Not quite. In C and a couple other langages, int 0 is false, anything 
else is true. In Lisp (and IIRC), an empty list is false, anything else 
is true. I'm sure someone else could come with more than a couple other 
non-cryptic langages that just don't have a proper boolean type.

Using "emptyness" as a false value in boolean expressions is not that 
uncommon, and it has proven so far to be a working solution. Also, 
returning the tested object instead of a bool just makes sens to me. 
FWIW, booleans are a late addition to Python, and quite a couple persons 
where worried that it would only lead to confusion.