Paul Moore writes: > While I frequently advocate on the side of "not every 3-line function needs > to be in the stdlib", there are a lot of convenience functions for Unix in > the stdlib
IMO "is_*" functions aren't exactly "convenience" functions, even if they're only a couple of lines implemented in terms of stat. I think of them as "discoverability" functions -- by pulling these distinctions out of class stat's data and documenting them as top- level functions it's a lot easier to learn about and make distinctions when you happen to coding in the neighborhood of "things you can do with file system objects of type X but not quite with those of type X' (which is very similar...)". I mean, I'm not willing to die on the hill of that particular terminology, but I do think it's worth making a distinction between saving a few dozen keystrokes with a function that "would be obvious to any skilled practitioner how to write it in 3 lines", and a function that would require many a skilled practitioner a google and reading a couple man pages to write in 3 lines. Steve _______________________________________________ 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/3RGNBK6AGXUGWYTXD2KM2QYWNHSBAJZA/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
