Joseph Garvin wrote: > As someone who learned C first, when I came to Python everytime I read > about a new feature it was like, "Whoa! I can do that?!" Slicing, dir(), > getattr/setattr, the % operator, all of this was very different from C. > > I'm curious -- what is everyone's favorite trick from a non-python > language? And -- why isn't it in Python? > > Here's my current candidate: > > So the other day I was looking at the language Lua. In Lua, you make a > line a comment with two dashes: > > -- hey, this is a comment. > > And you can do block comments with --[[ and ---]]. > > This syntax lets you do a nifty trick, where you can add or subtract a > third dash to change whether or not code runs: > > So you can change whether or not code is commented out just by adding a > dash. This is much nicer than in C or Python having to get rid of """ or > /* and */. Of course, the IDE can compensate. But it's still neat :)
Off topic, but in C or C++ it's easier to do it using #ifdef 1 ... #endif Then you just have to change the 1 into 0 or vice versa. It also prevents problems with nested comments. Back on topic, the lack of such a construct in Python is actually one of the very few things that bother me in the language. There are work-arounds, of course; idle, for example, has a feature that prepends a # to every line in the selection, or removes the # again. But not all editors have such a feature, and even if they have it I still need to select the block of code every time. Not that big a deal though. -- If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton Roel Schroeven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
