append on lists

[Duncan Booth]

"Chris Rebert" <clp at rebertia.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 1:20 AM, Armin <a at nospam.org> wrote:
>>  [1,2,3,4,7].append(c) -> Is this a valid expression?
> 
> Literally, no, because you can't call methods on literals.

Rubbish. There is no restriction about calling methods on literals. That 
expression is perfectly valid but has no practical use that I can see.

There is a syntax gotcha which you may have been thinking of: to call a 
method on an integer literal (or indeed to access any attribute) you have 
to use whitespace between the literal and the dot otherwise you have a 
float literal and a syntax error.

>>> 5 .__hex__()
'0x5'

The only relatively common use I can think of where you might want to call 
a method directly on a literal is to produce a list of strings while being 
lazy about the typing:

COLOURS = "red green blue pink yellow".split()

versus

COLOURS = ["red", "green", "blue", "pink", "yellow"]


-- 
Duncan Booth http://kupuguy.blogspot.com