The case for findfirst() becomes stronger! There seem plenty of ways to get this wrong.
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 09:30 Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas < python-ideas@python.org> wrote: > On Dec 5, 2019, at 08:53, Juancarlo Añez <apal...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > The proposed implementation of a findfirst() would handle many common > cases, and be friendly to newcomers (why do I need to deal with a Match > object?), specially if the semantics are those of *findall()*: > > next(iter(findall(...)), default=default) > > > The problem with using findall instead of finditer or search is that it > scans the whole document rather than just until the first match, and it > builds a potentially huge list just to throw it away. It’s pretty common > that one or both of those will be a serious performance issue. Imagine > asking to find the first double consonant in the OED and it takes a minute > to run and pins a gigabyte of memory. > > It’s unfortunate that these functions aren’t better matched. Why is there > a simple-semantics find-everything and a match-semantics find-iteratively > and find-one? But I don’t think adding a simple-semantics find-one that > works by inefficiently finding all is the right solution. > > And if the point of proposing first is that novices will figure out how to > write first(findall(…)) so we don’t need to add findfirst, then I think we > need findfirst even more, because novices shouldn’t learn that bad idea. > > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org > To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ > Message archived at > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/7ZBFVVVVNY6I74V2DBONGSCHDEDVKHNU/ > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > -- --Guido (mobile)
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