tim's idea makes my code crawl: (was: Compiling Python 1.6 under MacOS X ...)

[Tim Peters]

[Tim, w/ <shudder!> code]

[Grant Griffin]
> I thought that was a pretty neat idea.

I forgot to mention:  I released it to the public domain <0.9 wink>.

> However, when I tried it out (with some modifications for my
> application), I found that it didn't work right in the case where
> the directory I gave it was ".".  Is that just a cockpit problem on
> my part, or is that actually a "feature" of the above?
>
> If the latter, how should we fix it?  I thought about trapping "." out
> as a special case, then substituting the full path, but is there
> something better?

It does assume the argument given to it is a full path from the root.  So
change this line:

    dirs = [root]

to

    dirs = [os.path.abspath(root)]

and fiddle the imports however you like to make that pretty.  In my 2.0
code, I use

    import os.path.abspath as grant
    ...
    dirs = [grant(root)]

Whatever, it's a one-time cost at function startup.

For a *really* funky time, replace

    while dirs:
        dir = dirs.pop()

with

    for dir in dirs:

and you get a dirt-simple breadth-first search.  This relies on (a) that
"dirs" grows *inside* the loop; and (b) that Python's iteration protocol
doesn't "know" the loop length in advance.  The "for" keeps marching over
the ever-growing "dirs" until dirs stops growing and the hidden iteration
index oversteps its end.  Sometimes-nice bonus:  at the end, dirs contains a
list of all the directories you've visited!  If someone in your life is good
with needlepoint, that can make a great nerd conversation piece.

> beautiful-would-be-better-than-ug-ly y'rs,

and-sick-can-be-better-than-healthy-ly y'rs  - tim