In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "John Roth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Donn Cave" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Quoth "John Roth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > ... > > | str() should be something that's meaningful to a human being when > > | it's printed or otherwise rendered. > > > > I can't believe how many people cite this explanation - meaningful, > > friendly, pretty to a human being. What on earth does this mean, > > that couldn't be said more unambiguously? > > > > According to my impression of common applications for Python programs, > > rarely would anyone be looking at the output for esthetic gratification. > > I mean, imagine your users casting an appraising eye over the contours > > of a phrase emitted by the program, and praising the rhythmic effect of > > the punctuation it chose to use, or negative space created by tabs. heh. > > > > Whether for human eyes or any destination, properly formed output will > > carry the information that is required for the application, in a complete > > and unambiguous way and in the format that is most readily processed, > > and it will omit extraneous information. Are we saying anything other > > than this? > > I thought that's what I said. I fail to see how you derive any other > meaning from it. Possibly less verbiage and a concerete example > of how "meaningful" equates to "esthetics that obfustificate understanding" > and does not equate to "immediately useable, without having to wade > through a lot of irrelvant mental transformations" would help my > understanding. Not sure if that's a question. Maybe I can state this more clearly. Observation: Most who responded to this question offered an explanation of __str__ like "friendly to a human being", using one or more of meaningful, friendly or pretty. The online manual uses "informal". 1. These words are woefully ambiguous, to be applied in computer programming. While there may be some kind of absolute basis for esthetic appreciation, that clearly doesn't apply here, and terms like this have to be strictly relative to context created by the application. Summary: By itself, friendly to a human being is a vacuous notion and doesn't help anyone. 2. If we attempt to support the explanation with a more rigorous examination of the principles and how they'd apply to a string conversion, it's hard to make this come out favoring str over repr. In the end, they should both be meaningful and friendly, by any uncontorted definition of those terms. Summary: To the extent that they have any meaning, they are probably applied incorrectly as an explanation of __str__. So, among other conclusions, the documentation should be changed to offer a more sensible explanation of __str__. Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
