> [GvR]
> > > I personally see no way to defend ('' in 'x') returning false;
> > > it's so clearly a substring that any definition of
> > > substring-ness that excludes this seems mathematically wrong,
> > > despite your good intentions.
[SteveH]
> If you are serious about this proposal then clearly it would be as
> well to have "in" agree with find(), and currently
> anystring.find('') returns zero, suggesting the null string first
> appears at the beginning.
Yes, consistency strongly suggests that.
> > However, the backwards compatibility argument makes sense. It used to
> > raise an exception and it would probably break code if it stopped
> > doing so; longer strings are much less likely to be passed by accident
> > so the need for the exception there is less strong. I'm of two minds
> > on this now...
>
> However, I'm somewhat horrified to see this being discussed
> seriously. You can take pragmatism too far, you know ;-)
>
> Are you also proposing to allow
>
> if [2, 3] in [1, 2, 3, 4]
>
> which is effectively the meaning you seem to be proposing for
> strings?
No, since it's not a common thing to need.
> Where else in the language does the keyword "in" refer to anything
> other than membership?
Dictionary keys? That's certainly something very different from
sequence membership!
> Why do we need another way to do what find() and index() already do?
You must've missed the earlier thread -- it's because a substring test
is a common operation and the way to spell it with find() requires you
to tack on ">= 0" which many people accidentally leave out when in a
hurry.
> Should we also ensure that
>
> for s in "abc":
> print s
>
> prints
>
> a
> ab
> abc
> b
> bc
> c
>
> Should it also print a blank line because "'' in anystring" is true? I can
> see why users might want to be able to use a "string in string" construct,
> but it would seem to confuse the "for" semantics. Is there some other
> construct for which
>
> for v in object_or_instance:
>
> does not assign to v all x such that "x in object_or_instance" is true? I
> can see a few teaching problems here.
To this latter example I can only say, "A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds."
At least this still holds (unless x is an iterator or otherwise
mutated by access :-):
for v in x:
assert v in x
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4