1) How frequently do people write (some version of) this function? I think it is pretty frequent to check that a variable is not None before accessing it's attributes or element. 1a) Can all variants of the function be cleanly provided by a single stdlib function? 2 functions can reasonably cover the main use cases: access hierarchy with a sequence of keys and access hierarchy with string of keys. I think this could be a package which can extended with various other helper function like getlistpath which could gather the leaves from a tree like hierarchy. 2) Does the feature have subtleties that are easy to get wrong, and thus people write buggy versions of it without realising it? I think, no. 3) Does the lack of the feature cause code to be significantly less readable? Yes, this can save several lines of code. 4) Is code less secure and/or does it suffer from encapsulation breakage when this is done manually? (See, for instance, f-strings vs .format_map().) Yes, error handling is often omitted.
I feel this functionality has a bit of chicken & egg problem: if these functions would be available in stdlib, people would use it; but as they do not provide such a complex functionality which would make programmers start to look for such a library on pypi. _______________________________________________ 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/QY6NW7UUYHKP65HSUAZSOUDZZKGCBA6S/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
