[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 276 (simple iterator for ints) (original) (raw)

Michael P. Dubner dubnerm-news at mail.ru
Mon Jul 5 23:33:28 CEST 2004

Nicolas Fleury wrote:

Andrew Koenig wrote:

IMO it would be clearer, and equally elegant, to write this as something like

for i in indices(myList): ... I think that for i in myList.keys(): would be even better, because it allow the same usage for dict and list. Of course that wouldn't generalize to other sequences that support len. Wouldn't be better then that indices returns the keys for a dictionary instead? It would then support all these sequences. Maybe an index is not the good term to generalize, but I don't think key is really better, particularly since I would expect the use of a dictionary to be more rare. Maybe another function, let's say accesses, could be used for these rare cases, adding no overhead for common cases of indices: for key in accesses(myDict): pass for index in accesses(myList): pass

I'm not sure this kind of generalization is correct at all - list elements are sorted, but dict's doesn't. Also accesses(myDict) might be misunderstood as accesses(myDict.keys()) which is incorrect in general (because keys() not guaranteed to return keys every time in same order).

-- Best regards, Michael Dubner (dubnerm at mindless.com) Brainbench MVP/HTML+JavaScript (http://www.brainbench.com) PS: Sorry for my English

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