I agree with Guido's general comments on operators. Modern arithmetic
and algebra really took off with the introduction of operators. On the
other hand, I have seen condensed blocks of 'higher math', dense with
operators, that I could hardly read, and that reminded me of API or Perl.
On 3/15/2019 9:39 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
We don't design Python for ourselves. We design it for everyday users. Telling them that
they can assume nothing is an anti-pattern. People do rely quite a bit on their
intuitions. They also rely on implicit patterns already present in the language (i.e. in
no other place is + idempotent, in no other place is + a destructive rather than
concatenative or accumulative operator). As for commutativity, + would be obviously
commutative for numeric types and obviously noncommutative for sequence concatenation,
but for dicts the non-commutativity isn't obvious at all. And since the "|"
operator is already used for mapping views, the + operator for merging would be
unexpected.
I agree with this argument in favor of '|' over '+'.
What is missing from the discussion is that we flat out don't need an operator
for this.
I grepped idlelib's 60 modules for '.update('. Ignoring the tkinter
.update() calls, there are 3 uses of copy-update, to create a namespace
for eval or exec, that could use the new operator. There are 3 other
used to update-mutate an existing dict, which would not.
If someone took a similar look as stdlib modules, I missed it. So I
looked at non-package top-level modules in /lib (no recursion). The
following likely has a few mis-classification mistakes, but most were clear.
35 dict mutate updates
7 set updates
8 dict copy-updates that could use '|' (assuming not set updates)
# I did not think of set possibility until I had seen move of these
4 copy, intervening try or if, update
# these either could not use '|' or only with code contortion
5 tk widget updates
10 other update methods (a few 'dict updates might belong here)
10? 'update's in docstrings and comments
--
79 hits
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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