New user's initial thoughts / criticisms of Python

[Roy Smith]

In article <d15d9993-90f2-43bd-824f-a1df6b7a4556 at googlegroups.com>,
 rusi <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, November 9, 2013 6:38:25 PM UTC+5:30, John von Horn wrote:
> > Another useful tool in the programmer's toolbox
> 
> > Select DayofWeek
> 
> > 	case "mon"
> 
> > 	...
> 
> > end select
> 
> 
> You can typically write this in python as a dictionary
> 
> cases = {"mon": do_mon-action, 
>          "tue", do_tue_action,
> :
> :        
> }
> combined with an 'interpreter'
> cases[DayofWeek]()
> 
> Some variants:
> Need a default?
> cases.get(DayofWeek, do_default_action)()
> 
> Sometimes nicer to pass some parameters:
> cases[DayofWeek](some_relevant_context)

All of the above is true, but a more straight-forward way to emulate a 
switch/case is with a series of elifs:

if day_of_week == "mon":
   print "mondays suck"
elif day_of_week == "tue":
   print "at least it's not monday"
elif day_of_week == "wed":
   print "humpday!"
else:
   print "it's some other day"

I've done both.  Both are reasonable translations of switch/case logic 
from other languages.

The elif chain is more straight-forward to understand, especially for 
somebody new to the language.  It also can support more complicated 
selection logic:

elif day_of_week in ['sat', 'sun']:
   print "it's the weekend"

John's version is more modular, and lends itself to doing more dynamic 
things like passing around sets of actions as function arguments.