Switching from Perl here, and having a hard time letting go...
Suppose I have an "array" foo, and that I'm interested in the 4th, 8th, second, and last element in that array. In Perl I could write: my @wanted = @foo[3, 7, 1, -1]; I was a bit surprised when I got this in Python: >>> wanted = foo[3, 7, 1, -1] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: list indices must be integers Granted, Perl's syntax is often obscure and hard-to-read, but in this particular case I find it quite transparent and unproblematic, and the fictional "pythonized" form above even more so. The best I've been able to come up with in Python are the somewhat Perl-like-in-its-obscurity: >>> wanted = map(foo.__getitem__, (3, 7, 1, -1)) or the clearer but unaccountably sesquipedalian >>> wanted = [foo[i] for i in 3, 7, 1, -1] >>> wanted = [foo[3], foo[7], foo[7], foo[-1]] Are these the most idiomatically pythonic forms? Or am I missing something better? TIA! kynn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
