Janzert wrote:
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:47:41 am Dino Viehland wrote:
So I am +1 on unified the message and +1 on using the "does not
support indexing" one.
I'd be +1 on the unified message as well - but it seems what that
message should be may be contentious (and quite a bike shed
discussion at that). The bug David linked to
(http://bugs.python.org/issue5760) has a preference for subscript
because that's what's used elsewhere in the language.
For what it's worth, "unsubscriptable object" seems to me to be
mysterious to many newbies, and even a few non-newbies. It took me
something like seven years of coding to stop reading it
as "unscriptable object", and I'm sure I won't be the only one.
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.
How about if it's obj["item"]? To me the following makes complete sense,
but then it seems that I may just be the odd one out.
class A(object):
... pass
...
a = A()
a[1]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'A' object is unindexable
a["a"]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'A' object is unsubscriptable
I prefer "index" to "subscript" and "does not support foo" or "cannot be
fooed" to "is unfooable" (because, to me, "not" is more explicit than
"un-"). I also prefer the same term to be used irrespective of the
value used.
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