On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, wesley chun wrote: > i don't have any time myself either (getting ready for OSCON talk), > but i'm not sure what terry's OP was about... looking for a > well-written piece of code, a faster-performing snippet, or both? i > think he was just unsatissfied with his 1st attempt.
Exactly. It worked fine, but just seemed unpythonic to me. To use an analogy, not long ago I thought the best way to see if string X contained string Y was: if X.find(Y) != -1 Which works just fine. But another poster pointed out: if Y in X: Which is much more elegant/pythonic; but I didn't know you could do that with one string over another. For some reason, I had thought Y would have to exactly match one iterable element in X (e.g., one element of a list, or one character of a string) for that to work. Similarly, I was thinking that while that first attempt of mine worked, its apparent-to-me lameness suggested that there was a more idiomatic approach, and I wanted to find out what that was. Seeing the different approaches put forward by the various contributors was pretty interesting, though, I must say. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
