[Python-Dev] list.discard? (Re: dict.discard) (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Sep 23 03:34:56 CEST 2006

skip at pobox.com wrote:

It's obvious for sets and dictionaries that there is only one thing to discard and that after the operation you're guaranteed the key no longer exists. Would you want the same semantics for lists or the semantics of list.remove where it only removes the first instance?

In my use cases I usually know that there is either zero or one occurrences in the list.

But maybe it would be more useful to have a remove_all() method, whose behaviour with zero occurrences would just be a special case.

Or maybe remove() should just do nothing if the item is not found. I don't think I've ever found getting an exception from it to be useful, and I've often found it a nuisance. What experiences have others had with it?

-- Greg

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