[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 326 now online (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Wed Jan 7 04:30:23 EST 2004

Not to me. Random reuses like this would make Python into a mysterious language.

The reuse isn't random. It would be random if int compared smaller than everything and float compared larger than everything, or even if the strings "little" and "big" did the same.

Using min and max to be the smallest and largest objects, as well as being functions that can be called to find the smallest or largest value in a sequence, seems to be intuitive. But lets get past that for a moment.

Let us just pretend, for sake of argument, that min and max were to become the smallest and largest values. The only place this would effect pre-existing code is if someone were ordering functions based on '<' or '>' comparisons, IE: they would have to be sorting functions, specifically, min and max.

If it is desireable to warn programmers who have been doing this, it would be relatively easy to produce a warning when this happens (to warn those that had been previously sorting functions). Making the warning removable by using a future import for those of us who know about this behavior: from future import minmax And subsequently removing the warnings in later Python versions.

Not from me -- don't waste your time.

Are you against the idea of a top and bottom value, its location, or both?

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