Question about ast.literal_eval

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 11:26 PM, Frank Millman <frank at chagford.com> wrote:
> 0 - for the first entry in the list, the word 'check' (a placeholder - it is
> discarded at evaluation time), for any subsequent entries the word 'and' or
> 'or'.
>
> 1 - left bracket - either '(' or ''.
>
> 5 - right bracket - either ')' or ''.

I think what you have is safe, but extremely complicated to work with.
Six separate pieces, and things have to be in the right slots... I
think you've spent too many "complexity points" on the above three
components, and you're getting too little return for them. What
happens if the nesting is mucked up? Could get verrry messy to check.

Combining multiple conditions with a mixture of ands and ors is a
nightmare to try to explain (unless you just point to the Python docs,
which IMO costs you even more complexity points); the only safe option
is to parenthesize everything. The system I pushed for at work (which
was finally approved and implemented a few months ago) is more or less
this: conditions are grouped together into blocks; for each group, you
can choose whether it's "all" or "any" (aka and/or), and you choose
whether the overall result is all-groups or any-group. That still
costs a few complexity points (and, btw, our *actual* implementation
is a bit more complicated than that, but I think we could cut it down
to what I just described here without loss of functionality), but it
gives the bulk of what people will actually want without the
complexities of point-and-click code.

The downside of that sort of system is that it requires a two-level
tree. On the flip side, that's often how people will be thinking about
their conditions anyway (eg using a pair of conditions ">" and "<" to
implement a range check - conceptually it's a single check), so that
won't cost too much.

ChrisA