On 12/11/2011 04:04 AM, Alan Gauld wrote:
On 10/12/11 16:46, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
circumstances, regardless of which behaviour was choosen for append, it
would catch out some people some time.
Probably, although if returning 'self' were the default (which
of course only makes sense in a pure OO world like Smalltalk) people
would get used to the semantics. Consistency is all in these kinds of
situations. Sadly its one of the few areas where Python is slightly
inconsistent.
If returning 'self' is the default expected behavior, it would cause
inconsistencies with respect to immutable types. For example, `5
.__add__(2)`, one could expect it to return 5 instead of 7.
While I liked the attraction of "fluent interface" of being able to
easily chain function calls, it is inherently more inconsistent than
what Python are doing.
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