Attack a sacred Python Cow

[Kay Schluehr]

On 26 Jul., 19:20, Michele Simionato <michele.simion... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Jul 26, 5:28 pm, a... at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote:
>
> > IMO, you made a big mistake in combining your point with two other meaty
> > issues (whether method definitions should include self and whether !=
> > should use __eq__() as a fallback).
> <snip>
> >  If solid discussion
> > is your goal, I suggest that you wait a couple of weeks and start over
> > with a brand-new thread.
>
> I fully subscribe this. The point about __eq__ is legitimate and could
> be discussed with quite tones.
> I was bitten by this surprising behavior just a few
> days ago, I had defined __eq__ and I expected __neq__
> to be defined in the obvious way. I saw that it was
> not the case and I figured out immediately that
> I had to override __neq__ explicitely (I have
> the "explicit is better than implicit" mantra
> ingrained in my mind too), I did so and everything
> worked out as a charm. Total time loss: five minutes.
> So, it is not a big point. Still I think
> that it would make sense to automatically
> define __neq__ as the negation of __eq__.
> I suppose the developers did not want to make a special
> case in the implementation and this is also a legitimate
> concern.
>
>    Michele Simionato

Incidentally I knew that I had to overload the negation of __eq__
explicitely and did so writing
an __neq__ method. A few minutes later I found out it's not __neq__
but __ne__. So another few minutes were lost.