append on lists

[Armin]

Duncan Booth wrote:
> "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.

The semantic of [1,2,3,4,7].append(c) and [1,2,3,4,7] + c
(with c = [8,9]) is identical, but the first expression doesn't provide 
a value. Strange by design ...

--Armin


> 
> 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"]
> 
>