On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn < d.s.seljeb...@astro.uio.no> wrote: > In addition to the verb tense, I think it's important that mutators are > methods whereas functions do not mutate their arguments: > > lst.sort() > sorted(lst)
Unfortunately this isn't really viable in a language like Python where you can't add methods to a class. (list.sort() versus sorted() has as much or more to do with the fact that sort's implementation only works on lists, while sorted takes an arbitrary iterable.) Even core python provides a function for in-place list randomization, not a method. Following the proposed rule would just mean that we couldn't provide in-place shuffles at all, which is clearly not going to be acceptable. -n
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