I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned it on this thread, but with respect to
your comment about adding either on.empty or a decorator, the Django template
syntax uses
{% for x in iterator %}
<h2>{{ x }}</h2>
{% empty %}
<h2>Empty</h2>
{% endfor %}
and this seems to work quite well and be incredibly intuitive, at least for
Django html templates.
---- On Fri, 04 Mar 2022 13:45:21 -0600 Avi Gross via Python-list
<[email protected]> wrote ----
> {NOTE, after some diversion, this long message does revert a bit to the
> topic.}
>
> Ah, Chris, the games we played when we were young and relatively immature!
>
> Has anyone else played with embedding "escape sequences" or other gimmicks
> in unexpected places like filenames so that on the right terminals, such as
> the VT100, it displayed oddly or was hard to open or delete as what showed
> was not quite the underlying representation?
>
> The main reason for the restrictions in olden days was cost. Everything was
> so costly including storage/memory and CPU time. Clearly it is a lot easier
> to have fixed-length filenames that fit into say 16 bytes, or storing
> multiple flags about file permissions as single bits, even if it meant lots
> of bit-twiddling or using masks to retrieve their values. We think nothing
> of creating structures that have many others embedded in them as attributes
> or function calls that allow a hundred optional arguments so that the
> function spends much of the time used just figuring out what was set before
> doing whatever calculation is required to fulfill the request.
>
> I was reading a novel recently (Jack Reacher Series) where the main
> character is noticing how much technology has changed as they have been
> ignoring it for a decade or so. Everything seems to be coming up faster. My
> view was that if something seems ten times as fast as it was, it also
> probably is doing a hundred or ten thousand times as much to get that
> result. The real speed changes are often counterbalanced by expecting to do
> more. A web page served may display a screen of text but to transmit it may
> include not just lots of padding in the HTML, but have all kinds of code
> such as in Java or JavaScript or lots of back and forth with the server to
> keep something like a graph displayed being refreshed ...
>
> So back to filenames, the concept of having to search for long filenames
> that may not even be stored sequentially in large blocks that can be read
> (ahead) efficiently, may have seemed to be so illogical as not to be
> considered. So given that the shorter ones were not allowed to have embedded
> spaces, it made sense to treat them like tokens that could be broken up at
> whitespace. As mentioned, languages (or other programs) would often parse a
> command line and create something like this for the main program in C with
> suitable version in Python and other languages:
>
> main(int argc, char *argv[])
>
> The code variations on the above do suppose that something has already
> parsed the command line that invoked them and partitioned it properly into
> individual strings placed in an array of such strings and also returned how
> many arguments it saw. Users invoking the program needed to be careful such
> as using double quotes around anything with embedded spaces, where allowed.
>
> But like many paradigms, there can be a shift. Consider the fact that
> languages like Python are constantly parsing things like names. Can you
> create a variable name like "me first" with an embedded space or even other
> symbols normally reserved such as parentheses? Most languages do not like
> such things. It makes it hard to parse if not quoted in some unique way. Yet
> languages like R happily allow such constructs if placed in back quotes
> (grave accents?) as in `me & you` as a variable name or the name of a
> function. Of course, you then never use the darn name without the extra
> quotes.
>
> Similarly, when you make an object like a DataFrame, can you include spaces
> and other things in the names of columns (or sometimes rows)? If so, is
> there only access some ways and not others?
>
> The answer often is not simple. As Chris repeatedly highlights, making a
> language consistent as you play with features can be VERY hard and sometimes
> not quite possible without relaxing some rules or making exceptions.
> Sometimes the answer varies. In base R a data.frame can be given a column
> name like "me + you" which it then stores as "me...you" leading to odd
> results. But it happily returns that result if you ask for mydf$me using
> auto-completion. Spell it out fully and it won't find it! A later package
> added on makes modified data.frame objects called tibbles which do not
> autocomplete but do completely store and let you access the name so mydf$me
> fails and mydf$"me + you" or mydf
---- On Fri, 04 Mar 2022 13:45:21 -0600 Avi Gross via Python-list
<[email protected]> wrote ----
me + you` works but oddly an alternative format like mydf[, "me + you"] works
while the similar mydf[, `me + you`] fails!
>
> My point is not about R but a more general one. I can rant about many other
> languages, LOL! Allowing spaces or other characters in what used to be a
> more easily viewable name that can be parsed easier, can lead to having to
> find every place such things are used and seeing if they can be made to work
> consistently. I show an example above where it is not consistent, in my
> view.
>
> But when humans view things and their perceptions differ, you are inviting
> disagreements about whatever you implement. You may end up having to make
> people do more than they would prefer such as quoting all variable names
> even if they do not "need" it. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to name a
> variable 1time@least if you felt like it? Many people have passwords like
> that. I think the answer is NO, not if it meant quoting every variable
> because there was no longer any reasonable way to parse programs.
>
> The issue that started the discussion was different but in a sense similar.
> If you want to extend the functionality of a "for" loop in one of many
> possible ways, how do you design a way to specify it so it can both be
> unambiguously parsed and implemented while at the same time making sense to
> humans reading it and interpreting it using their human language skills.
>
> I happen to think this is even harder for some who speak in languages other
> than English and have to program in languages loosely based on English. I am
> happy that I seem to think in English now but I was seven when I first
> encountered it after thinking in others. People who program do not all speak
> English or are more fluent in other languages. T may may be used to other
> word orders for example. They may move verbs to the end of a sentence or
> place adjectives or other modifiers after versus before a word and forget
> about all the other games played where the same word means something
> completely different. To them ELSE may either mean nothing or the phrase IF
> ... ELSE may be said differently or adding a clause after the construct is
> not seen as natural.
>
> So was this way of doing FOR ... ELSE the only or even best way, is what
> some of this debate is about.
>
> I am thinking of a function in some languages that lets you specify what
> should happen in a later circumstance. In a language like R, you can specify
> one or more instances of on.exit(...) that are not run immediately. Each one
> can replace the commands in the previous one or add on to it. When the
> function they are defined in exits for any reason, it pauses to run any
> uncleared such commands. Clearly this works better if a language has a way
> to defer evaluation of code so there are no side effects.
>
> So consider the suggestion of code that should be run if you have a loop and
> you break out of it. Could you design an alternate way to handle that other
> than adding an ELSE clause after the loop?
>
> Clearly you could simply add a function called on.break() that can be used
> as described but only within the body of that loop. It might be something
> that can be set and unset as needed and when the loop is exited, the program
> implicitly checks to see if any code has been dynamically set and executes
> it. This clearly is not necessarily a good way or better way, but is an
> example of how you can implement something without using any key words. No
> need to think about forcing the use of ELSE versus a new keyword that may
> conflict with existing code. Yes, the name on.break may conflict but that is
> trivially handled in Python by invoking it with a full name that includes
> what module it is in or by creating an alias.
>
> So what about considering an alternate approach that does handle a for loop
> that does nothing? Would it create huge incompatibilities for something like:
>
> for eye in range(0), on.empty=... :
> pass
>
> In some languages, arbitrary additional arguments are allowed, and if not
> understood, are ignored. Python does not allow anything like the above. And
> in this case, the entire body of the for loop is never evaluated so no
> gimmicks inside the body are possible. A gimmick before it might work and I
> even wonder if there is room here for a decorator concept like:
>
> @on.empty(...)
> for eye in range(0):
> pass
>
> I am ending with a reminder. NOTHING I am writing here is meant to be taken
> seriously but merely as part of a well-intentioned debate to share ideas and
> not to win or lose but learn. Python is more than a language but also has
> aspects of a culture and we sometimes talk about whether something has a
> pythonic flavor or is pythonic versus translating it literally from a
> language like C rather than using the ideas common in python. The method
> chosen to implement the ELSE clause here may well be Pythonic and some of my
> attempts to show other ways may well not be. I am not one of those that find
> the current implementation to be the wrong one and will happily use it when
> I have code that can be done well that way. I am just discussing the issue
> and wider ones. Languages have an amazing variety of designs that fascinate
> me.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Angelico <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: Fri, Mar 4, 2022 12:46 pm
> Subject: Re: Behavior of the for-else construct
>
>
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2022 at 02:02, Tim Chase <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 2022-03-04 11:55, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > > In MS-DOS, it was perfectly possible to have spaces in file names
> >
> > DOS didn't allow space (0x20) in filenames unless you hacked it by
> > hex-editing your filesystem (which I may have done a couple times).
> > However it did allow you to use 0xFF in filenames which *appeared* as
> > a space in most character-sets.
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure which APIs worked which way, but I do believe that I
> messed something up at one point and made a file with an included
> space (not FF, an actual 20) in it. Maybe it's something to do with
> the (ancient) FCB-based calls. It was tricky to get rid of that file,
> though I think it turned out that it could be removed by globbing,
> putting a question mark where the space was.
>
> (Of course, internally, MS-DOS considered that the base name was
> padded to eight with spaces, and the extension padded to three with
> spaces, so "READ.ME" would be "READ\x20\x20\x20\x20ME\x20", but that
> doesn't count, since anything that enumerates the contents of a
> directory would translate that into the way humans think of it.)
>
> > I may have caused a mild bit of consternation in school computer labs
> > doing this. ;-)
>
> Nice :)
>
> > > Windows forbade a bunch of characters in file names
> >
> > Both DOS and Windows also had certain reserved filenames
> >
> > https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/windows-10-still-wont-let-you-use-these-file-names-reserved-in-1974/
> >
> > that could cause issues if passed to programs.
>
> Yup. All because, way back in the day, they didn't want to demand the
> colon. If you actually *want* to use the printer device, for instance,
> you could get a hard copy of a directory listing like this:
>
> DIR >LPT1:
>
> and it's perfectly clear that you don't want to create a file called
> "LPT1", you want to send it to the printer. But noooooo it had to be
> that you could just write "LPT1" and it would go to the printer.
>
> > To this day, if you poke around on microsoft.com and change random
> > bits of URLs to include one of those reserved filenames in the GET
> > path, you'll often trigger a 5xx error rather than a 404 that you
> > receive with random jibberish in the same place.
> >
> > https://microsoft.com/…/asdfjkl → 404
> > https://microsoft.com/…/lpt1 → 5xx
> > https://microsoft.com/…/asdfjkl/some/path → 404
> > https://microsoft.com/…/lpt1/some/path → 5xx
> >
> > Just in case you aspire to stir up some trouble.
> >
>
> In theory, file system based URLs could be parsed such that, if you
> ever hit one of those, it returns "Directory not found". In
> practice... apparently they didn't do that.
>
> As a side point, I've been increasingly avoiding any sort of system
> whereby I take anything from the user and hand it to the file system.
> The logic is usually more like:
>
> If path matches "/static/%s":
> 1) Get a full directory listing of the declared static-files directory
> 2) Search that for the token given
> 3) If not found, return 404
> 4) Return the contents of the file, with cache markers
>
> Since Windows will never return "lpt1" in that directory listing, I
> would simply never find it, never even try to open it. This MIGHT be
> an issue with something that accepts file *uploads*, but I've been
> getting paranoid about those too, so, uhh... my file upload system now
> creates URLs that look like this:
>
> https://sikorsky.rosuav.com/static/upload-49497888-6bede802d13c8d2f7b92ca9fac7c
>
> That was uploaded as "pie.gif" but stored on the file system as
> ~/stillebot/httpstatic/uploads/49497888-6bede802d13c8d2f7b92ca9fac7c
> with some metadata stored elsewhere about the user-specified file
> name. So hey, if you were to try to upload a file that had an NTFS
> invalid character in it, I wouldn't even notice.
>
> Maybe I'm *too* paranoid, but at least I don't have to worry about
> file system attacks.
>
>
> ChrisA
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>
>
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