Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> writes: > As far as I can see, in practice, people talk about obj[i] as the item > at index i, not the item at subscript i -- the term "subscript" in > this context seems to be rare to non-existent except for the error > message.
Presumably, the same people would also call ‘obj[i]’ the item at *key* ‘i’, if ‘obj’ is a dictionary. For an object that supports neither indexes nor keys, though, how is Python to know which the user meant? It's a single operation as far as the parser is concerned, so there needs to be a single term for it. That term is “subscript”. Your point about the awkward word “unsubscriptable” is well-taken, though. Perhaps a simple improvement to the message wording: >>> foo = 3 >>> foo[6] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: 'int' object does not support subscripts >>> foo['spam'] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: 'int' object does not support subscripts -- \ “I lost a button-hole.” —Steven Wright | `\ | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com