The del statement

[George Sakkis]

On May 8, 2:58 am, Arnaud Delobelle <arno... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> George Sakkis wrote:
> > One of the few Python constructs that feels less elegant than
> > necessary to me is the del statement. For one thing, it is overloaded
> > to mean three different things:
> > (1) del x: Remove x from the current namespace
> > (2) del x[i]: Equivalent to x.__delitem__(i)
> > (3) del x.a: Equivalent to x.__delattr__('a') (or delattr(x,'a'))
>
> Note that the 'X = Y' construct has the corresponding three meanings:
>
> (1) x = 4 # Bind x to 4 in the 'current namespace'
> (2) x[i] = 4 # equivalent to x.__setitem__(i, 4)
> (3) x.a = 4 # Equivalent to x.__setattr__('a', 4)
>
> What conclusion should we draw from that?

I think you're trying to imply that it is consistent with setting a
value (same with getting). I guess what bugs me about "del" is that
it's a keyword and not some universally well-known punctuation. Do you
you feel that Python misses a "pop" keyword and respective
expressions ?

(1) pop x: Remove x from the current namespace and return it.
(2) pop x[i]: Instead of x.pop(i)
(3) pop x.a: Equivalent to "_y=x.a; del x.a; return y"

George