Python style guidelines
Donn Cave
donn at u.washington.edu
Thu Mar 11 11:49:54 EST 2004
In article <EO%3c.2675$G3.20988 at localhost>,
Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
[... re "if a.find(v):"]
> I believe it's more likely they just forgot what find() did return, as
> they were writing the code. I've done the same, thinking it was a
> boolean, not thinking that it returned a negative but that negatives
> were considered false.
I'm sure that's common. In principle, seems to me that in
many if not most cases the "index" function expresses the
result better - for example,
try:
t = a.index(e)
except ValueError:
return a
else:
return a[:t]
But for some reason, the average programmer seems to greatly
prefer non-valid error returns over exceptions, even though
they're naturally idiosyncratic and prone to this kind of
error. I sure don't recall seeing "index" very often, anyway.
Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu
More information about the Python-list
mailing list