[Python-Dev] Pre-PEP: Allow Empty Subscript List Without Parentheses (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat Jun 10 01:48:22 CEST 2006

Noam Raphael wrote:

This PEP suggests to allow the use of an empty subscript list, for example x[], which is currently a syntax error. It is suggested that in such a case, an empty tuple will be passed as an argument to the getitem and setitem methods. This is consistent with the current behaviour of passing a tuple with n elements to those methods when a subscript list of length n is used, if it includes a comma.

It's not, really -- unless other places where a tuple can appear were changed likewise, e.g.

x =

would have to assign an empty tuple to x, etc.

But you may also have several zero-dimensional arrays, that is, single values - for example, the income tax rate.

But why do these need to be 0-dimensional arrays rather than just scalars? I'm having trouble seeing any use for such a distinction.

I'm particularly unconvinced by the spreadsheet argument. In that context, I'd say that everything is a 2-D array, and a single cell is a 1x1 2-D array, not a 0-D array.

-- Greg

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