[Python-Dev] Fwd: Problem withthe API for str.rpartition() (original) (raw)

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Wed Sep 6 10:32:19 CEST 2006

Nick Coghlan wrote:

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

At 04:55 PM 9/5/2006 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Sep 5, 2006, at 4:43 PM, Jim Jewett wrote:

I think I finally figured out where Raymond is coming from. For Raymond, "head" is where he started processing -- for rpartition, this is the .endswith part. For me, "head" is the start of the data structure -- always the .startswith part. We won't resolve that with anything suggesting a sequential order; we need something that makes it clear which part is the large leftover. See, for me, it's all about the results of the operation, not how the results are (supposedly) used. The way I think about it is that I've got some string and I'm looking for some split point within that string. That split point is clearly the "middle" (but "sep" works too) and everything to the right of that split point gets returned in "right" while everything to the left gets returned in "left". +1 for left/sep/right for both operations. It's easier to remember a visual correlation (left,sep,right) than it is to try and think about an abstraction in which the order of results has something to do with what direction I found the separator in. -1. The string docs are already lousy with left/right terminology that is flatout wrong when dealing with a script that is displayed with a right-to-left or vertical orientation*. In reality, strings are processed such that index 0 is the first character and index -1 is the last character, regardless of script orientation, but you could be forgiven for not realising that after reading the current string docs. Let's not make that particular problem any worse. I don't see anything wrong with Raymond's 'head, sep, tail' and 'tail, sep, head' terminology (although noting the common postcondition 'sep not in head' in the docstrings might be useful). However, if we're going to use the same result tuple for both, then I'd prefer 'before, sep, after', with the partition() postcondition being 'sep not in before' and the rpartition() postcondition being 'sep not in after'. Those terms are accurate regardless of script orientation. Either way, I suggest putting the postcondition in the docstring to make the difference between the two methods explicit. Regards, Nick. * I acknowledge that Python code is almost certainly going to be edited in a left-to-right text editor, because it's an English-based programming language. But the strings that string methods like partition() and rpartition() are used with are quite likely to be coming from or written to a or user interface that uses a native script orientation. Perhaps we should be thinking "beginning" and "end" here, though it seems as though it won't be possible to find a terminology that will be intuitively obvious to everyone.

regards Steve

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