Naive idiom questions

[Terran Melconian]

On 2008-01-31, Bjoern Schliessmann <usenet-mail-0306.20.chr0n0ss at spamgourmet.com> wrote:

> Did you measure such impact on your application?
> Also see http://www.skymind.com/~ocrow/python_string/

I don't have a real application yet.  That was, in fact, exactly the web
page which informed me that the MutableString class was not implemented
with mutable primitives.

> Look at "lower level" HLLs. In C++, you'd have to use

Well, in C++, I would use something like:

    string sa[5][5];

string has a default constructor, so I'll get a 5x5 array of empty
strings.  Alternatively, I could use boost::array if I wanted container
semantics.

If I needed something dynamically resizable, I could use:

    vector<vector<string> > vs(5);

and then I could append elements to each one.  If I wanted needed to
resize them all to 5 immediately, I would have to loop:

    for (vector<vector<string> >::iterator i = vs.begin(); i != vs.end(); i++)
	i->resize(5);

and that isn't particularly concise or elegant either, but the odds of
needing them to start out at size 5 and *also* be resizable later are
low for most applications.

> Personally, I like list comprehensions much better.        

Perhaps the take-away lesson is that comprehensions should be seen as a
very fundamental operation in Python, and I have the wrong idea by
considering them advanced.