Python's own docs' search doesn't seem to recognize the <= symbol. Google
does, but if one doesn't know that, then one won't try it. Google
inconsistently decides when and which symbols are considered word chars,
and I don't know whether the rules are even documented.
Perhaps `help` should be the canonical way to find initial info on
operators. The more reliably useful `help` is, the more people will
recommend and get in the habit of using it.
The current docs for `help` say that a string argument will be interpreted
as an identifier, keyword, or "documentation topic" (such as "LISTS"), but
it says nothing about symbols.
On 3.6.6, calling `help('+')` prints out the documentation for operator
precedence, which is kind of jumping into the intermediate part of the
pool. Instead, it can explain that the symbol is used as both a unary and
binary operator (giving examples of each), say that addition is typically
numerical add or string concat, mention that the operator looks for the
special method __add__/__pos__, point to related operators (like +=), and
point to more info on operators in general (which will point to operator
overloading).
On Wed, Jun 19, 2019, 15:19 Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 4:31 AM Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 11:27 AM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 2:07 AM Franklin? Lee
> >> <leewangzhong+pyt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > For example,
> >> > if (A <: B or A <: C) and A <: D:
> >> > is not much better than
> >> > if issubclass(A, (B, C)) and issubclass(A, D):
> >> > especially if you don't know what either of those mean. You can search
> >> > for issubclass, but you can't search for <:.
> >>
> >> Please can people stop trotting out this tired argument? I just typed
> >> "<:" (without the quotes) into Google - or rather, into my Chrome
> >> omnibar - and the first hit was a Stack Overflow question regarding
> >> the "<:" operator in Scala, the second is Scala documentation about
> >> "Upper Type Bounds" which looks plausible, and then there are a few
> >> others that may or may not be related.
> >>
> >> Symbols CAN be searched for, both in Google and in many documentation
> tools.
> >
> >
> > It's still harder. E.g. the wikipedia article on subtyping does not show
> in the search results for "<:", and searching for "<: wikipedia" ignores
> the "<:" entirely and just searches for "wikipedia".
> >
>
> Fair. But it keeps being said as "you can't search for", which at best
> is an exaggeration. There is a related problem with symbols in that
> they often have multiple meanings (if you search for info about "@" in
> a Python context, you'll get both matrix multiplication and
> decorators), but they are still searchable.
>
> (And maybe if people stop using "they're not searchable" as an
> argument, the tools that ARE completely unable to search for symbols
> will be seen as flawed tools.)
>
> ChrisA
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