On 7 Dec 2006, at 07:15, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> Michael Urman wrote:
>
>> The idea that slicing a match object should produce a match object
>> sounds like a foolish consistency to me.
>
> well, the idea that adding m[x] as a convenience alias for m.group(x)
> automatically turns m into a list-style sequence that also has to
> support full slicing sounds like an utterly foolish consistency to me.
How about we remove the word "foolish" from the debate?
> the OP's original idea was to make a common use case slightly
> easier to
> use. if anyone wants to argue for other additions to the match object
> API, they should at least come up with use cases based on real
> existing
> code.
An example where it might be useful:
m = re.match('(?:([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) (?P<rect>rect)'
'|([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) ([0-9]+) (?P<circle>circle))',
lineFromFile)
if m['rect']:
drawRectangle(m[1:5])
elif m['circle']:
drawCircle(m[1:3], m[3])
Is that really so outlandish? I'm not saying that this is
necessarily the best way, but why force people to write
list(m)[1:5]
or
[m[i] for i in xrange(1,5)]
??
If the only reason is that some of the match object APIs, which I
maintain are very unlikely to be wanted on a slice anyway, can't
possibly produce consistent results, then why not just do away with
the APIs and return a tuple or something instead? That way you can
treat the match object as if it were just a tuple (which it could
easily have been).
> (and while you guys are waiting, I suggest you start a new thread
> where
> you discuss some other inconsistency that would be easy to solve with
> more code in the interpreter, like why "-", "/", and "**" doesn't work
> for strings, lists don't have a "copy" method, sets and lists have
> different API:s for adding things, we have hex() and oct() but no
> bin(),
> str.translate and unicode.translate take different arguments, etc.
> get
> to work!)
Oh come on! Comparing this with exponentiating strings is just not
helpful.
Kind regards,
Alastair.
--
http://alastairs-place.net
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