3 ms·

Author here. There is no conclusion to the article, the weird syntax is just a mean to an end: - This makes people curious, so they read. - This gives an opp

Author here. There is no conclusion to the article, the weird syntax is just a mean to an end: - This makes people curious, so they read. - This gives an opportunity to show a lot of cool features of the language in a short format. As the post mentions, Python's learning curve is smooth but long, so it's nice to be able to introduce some tricks to coders that would otherwise not be exposed to them. - This demonstrates those things indeed, as you said, work together. Even if Python is a language on which a lot of things have been bolted on after the fact, it's still decently integrated. - This allow me to insert a warning about not abusing them because even if Python is a readable language, you can always go too far. It's good maintain this message in the community. - It's just fun, really. It's an article I would enjoy reading.

agumonkey 3y ago
as a semi plt nerd, i like to push grammars a bit deeper than average application, thanks and often indentation helps keeping track of structures
babel_ 3y ago
Must admit I wasn't quite sure what the point of the first one was. 0xBEAF is literally just 48815, as is 0x_B_E_A_F, as the numeric literals now ignore interleaved "_", and you just format it as a float after-the-fact as normal in an f-string. So why? There's nothing particularly special in the use of syntax here, so hardly a curious or weird artifact, let alone abuse. > * has a completely different meaning I'd personally rephrase this, as the idea around splatting is that it symmetrically can "gather" and "spread" multiple values, albeit with the syntactic limtations of starred expressions (likewise with *). You do seem to confuse syntax for semantics: [][:] = [...] is a semantic trick to avoid binding a sequence, if you did a = [][:] = [1,2] you'd find a == [1,2] because it just passes along the reference to the right hand side, so without another layer it's just skipping binding it, and that's the major trick with the second one, being that it "discards" the first value when destructuring this way (so long as that first value is a sequence). This can be done "better" with _, *_ destructuring, which probably weirds more people out to discover that shadowing in a statement is legal (and the unused/shadowed variable is "better" as it works even when the first value isn't a sequence, making [][:] more fragile). People with knowledge of other languages might get confused by _ being a variable, but that's a known stumbling block. Naturally, everyone has their own journey through discovering Python (or whatever language) and may or may not touch upon many parts of it syntactically and semantically. However, as far as "weird" syntax that has valid semantics goes, I'd say this is far from esoteric or unusual (where's the walrus?), and some parts are just the natural expression (such as with the splatting). Really, the only code smell I find here is the inlining of everything and redundancy (i.e. splatting a generator into a list)!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

agumonkey 3y ago

as a semi plt nerd, i like to push grammars a bit deeper than average application, thanks and often indentation helps keeping track of structures

babel_ 3y ago

Must admit I wasn't quite sure what the point of the first one was. 0xBEAF is literally just 48815, as is 0x_B_E_A_F, as the numeric literals now ignore interleaved "_", and you just format it as a float after-the-fact as normal in an f-string. So why? There's nothing particularly special in the use of syntax here, so hardly a curious or weird artifact, let alone abuse. > * has a completely different meaning I'd personally rephrase this, as the idea around splatting is that it symmetrically can "gather" and "spread" multiple values, albeit with the syntactic limtations of starred expressions (likewise with *). You do seem to confuse syntax for semantics: [][:] = [...] is a semantic trick to avoid binding a sequence, if you did a = [][:] = [1,2] you'd find a == [1,2] because it just passes along the reference to the right hand side, so without another layer it's just skipping binding it, and that's the major trick with the second one, being that it "discards" the first value when destructuring this way (so long as that first value is a sequence). This can be done "better" with _, *_ destructuring, which probably weirds more people out to discover that shadowing in a statement is legal (and the unused/shadowed variable is "better" as it works even when the first value isn't a sequence, making [][:] more fragile). People with knowledge of other languages might get confused by _ being a variable, but that's a known stumbling block. Naturally, everyone has their own journey through discovering Python (or whatever language) and may or may not touch upon many parts of it syntactically and semantically. However, as far as "weird" syntax that has valid semantics goes, I'd say this is far from esoteric or unusual (where's the walrus?), and some parts are just the natural expression (such as with the splatting). Really, the only code smell I find here is the inlining of everything and redundancy (i.e. splatting a generator into a list)!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]