[Python-Dev] Half-baked proposal: * (and **?) in assignments (original) (raw)

Brian Quinlan brian@sweetapp.com
Sat, 23 Nov 2002 12:27:38 -0800

Martin v. Loewis wrote:

It depends on the reader. A reader familiar with the time module will recognize tmfoo as a field of struct tm, and then figure out what field it is.

A reader familiar with the time module might have the meaning of each element of the 9-tuple memorized.

That the field is called mday and not just day is surprising; if the reader is surprised enough, he will look up the documentation, and the rationale will become clear immediately.

The meaning of the fields is documented in the development documentation but not in the current release documentation. I'm not sure why...

And the day field being called "mday" is still a mystery to me. So is the "tm_" prefix.

Cheers, Brian