[Python-Dev] PEP 326 (quick location possibility) (original) (raw)

Aahz aahz at pythoncraft.com
Thu Jan 29 14:28:22 EST 2004

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004, Tim Peters wrote:

[Aahz]

I'm curious: why you didn't use None as the initial value or use some other hack to avoid initializing with a specific number? In 2.3, None compares less than anything else; the search loop required that the initial value compare larger than anything else (although I wouldn't have been comfortable with relying on that None compares smaller either, since that's non-obvious version-specific behavior). I've since tended to write these kinds of loops as: globalmin = None ... if globalmin is None or score(candidate) < globalmin: globalmin = score(candidate) do stuff appropriate for a new local minimum

That's precisely what I was suggesting, yes.

but it's easy to forget the "globalmin is None" clause -- in which case, because None compares less than everything else, the "if" test never passes.

That's not a problem I've run into, and I don't see it cropping up all that often on c.l.py. (To be precise, I don't have any memories of it cropping up.)

Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death." --GvR

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list