for -- else: what was the motivation?

[Avi Gross]

Chris, I was not arguing that at all.

I was saying some rationales about how to order  choices exist based on
ideas like efficiency or other considerations.  Sometimes people are
mistaken as something may take constant time as implemented. And yes, many
rules have countless exceptions. For example, if something is expected to
rarely or never happen, code within that branch may not be needed to be
optimized in any way as long as it works in the remote chance it is called.

I think what was suggested here is more about code readability
considerations and for some of us, making us stand on our heads to puzzle
things out is harder than ordering longer items ...

On Sun, Oct 9, 2022, 12:30 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Oct 2022 at 03:22, Avi Gross <avi.e.gross at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Smallest code blocks first may be a more modern invention.
> >
> > Some would argue for a rule related to efficiency of execution. When you
> > have multiple blocks as in an if-else or case statement with multiple
> > choices, that you order the most common cases first. Those shorten
> > execution more often than the rarer cases especially the ones that should
> > never happen.
> >
>
> Seems fairly dubious and full of special-cases. If you want to follow
> that rule, it should be easy enough to still permit for-else clauses.
> It's an extremely weak argument against for-else.
>
> ChrisA
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>