Roy Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > If you are passing a sequence conceptually, then it's more Pythonic to > > pass it as a sequence explicitly:: > > > > def __init__(self, items): > > """ Call with e.g. Stack(["foo", "bar"]) """ > > self.stack = list(items) > > I don't get this. You're forcing a copy to be made of the list.
The 'items' object might not be a list; it might be some other sequence. The rest of the class (as shown by the original poster) requires it to be a list. > This changes the semantics of the original class, because the > operations no longer change the original list. Which "original class" are you referring to? The one posted by the original poster of this thread had no "original list"; it gathered the positional arguments (using '*items') into an 'items' parameter, which *doesn't exist* until the function body executes. There *is* no "original list" in that implementation posed by the original poster; it's constructed at call time from the positional parameters to the function. If anything, my implementation above *preserves* that semantic, by making a new list from the passed-in sequence. -- \ “Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be | `\ over here, looking through your stuff.” —Jack Handey | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
