On Sunday 29 May 2005 03:18 pm, John Machin wrote: > LenS wrote: > > Trying to learn OOP concepts and decided to use Python for this > > purpose. I have coded the following CLASS and it seems to work fine. > > Any comments on the code or suggestions would be appreciated.
> A practical problem: not everbody's name can be shoe-horned into the > first/initial/last model. You face catastrophic loss of information. > > Some examples, with "last" name in capitals: > > J. Edgar HOOVER -> J E HOOVER > Rip J. VAN WINKLE -> Rip J VAN > Jean Paul DE LA SALLE -> Jean P DE > DE LA SALLE, Jean Paul -> LA S DE > MAO Tse Tung -> Tse T MAO # or MAO T Tung > MAO Tse-tung -> Tse-tung M <empty> # or an IndexError > MAO Zedong -> Zedong M <empty> # or an IndexError > Vigdis ERIKSDOTTIR -> Vigdis E <empty> # and lost the gender, too > Gunnlaug ILLUGASON Ormstunga -> Gunnlaug I Ormstunga # nickname > "Snakestongue" > Ivan Denisovich SHUKHOV -> Ivan D SHUKHOV # and lost father's "first" > name, too > Friedrich Heinrich Karl VON UND ZU HOHENLOHE -> Friedrich H Karl > NGUYEN Thi Thanh Van -> Thi T NGUYEN > # "Thi" means "female" and "Nguyen" is the "last" name of about 50% of > the Vietnamese population ... While I might say something snide about unnecessarily crucifying a piece of "toy" code for learning OOP, this is *really* nice set of test cases! Thank you, I'm saving this for reference. :-) Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list