[Python-3000] Changing behavior of sequence multiplication by negative integer (original) (raw)

Lawrence Oluyede l.oluyede at gmail.com
Thu Aug 10 14:03:28 CEST 2006

The "negative coerced to 0" behaviour is to make it easy to do things like padding a sequence to a minimum length:

seq = seq + pad * (minlength- len(seq)) Without the current behaviour, all such operations would need to be rewritten as: seq = seq + pad * max((minlength- len(seq)), 0) Gratuitous breakage that leads to a more verbose result gets a solid -1 from me :)

That sound a -1 to me too. Thanks for the explanation. I was sure there was one for that kind of behavior.

-- Lawrence http://www.oluyede.org/blog

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