On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:29:59 +0000, Alex van der Spek wrote: > Having been taught programming in Algol60 Python still defeats me at > times! Particularly since Algol60 wasn't very long lived and what came > thereafter (FORTRAN) much worse.
Fortran came first. Fortran was the first high-level language which allowed the programmer to write things that looked rather like the sorts of mathematical expressions they were used to. There were a few higher-level assembly languages that came before Fortran, such as SpeedCoding, Fortran's predecessor, but Fortran was the first truly high-level programming language, and even in 1957 it came with an optimizing compiler. I'm not really familiar with Algol, but I do know Pascal, and you should think of the append method to be like a Pascal procedure. Because Python doesn't have true procedures, it follows the convention that returning the special object None signals the intention to return nothing at all. Hence your example below: >>>> c = a.append(b) >>>> print c > None -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
