New user's initial thoughts / criticisms of Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2013 21:39:27 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> My code to handle that starts out with this array:
> 
> "minor weapon":({
>     70,"+1 weapon: 2,000gp [weapon]",
>     85,"+2 weapon: 8,000gp [weapon]",
>     90,"Specific weapon [minor specific weapon]", 100,"Special ability
>     [minor special weapon] and roll again",
> }),
> 
> (that's Pike; in Python it'd be a list, or maybe a tuple of tuples), and
> denormalizes it into a lookup table by creating 70 entries quoting the
> first string, 15 quoting the second, 5, and 10, respectively.

Ewww :-(

Imagine having to print out the dict looking for an error in the lookup 
table. Or imagine the case where you have:

0...20000: do this
20001...890001: do that
890001...890003: do something else

Don't get me wrong, it's a clever and reasonable solution for your 
specific use-case. But I'd much rather have a lookup table variant that 
matches on intervals.

Hmmm... if you had an interval data type, which was hashable, that would 
probably be trivial... what am I missing? Ah, of course, what I'm missing 
is that although you're storing intervals as the keys, you're matching 
regular ints.

I wonder if this would be a good use-case for Antoine Pitrou's 
TransformDict?

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0455/


-- 
Steven