[ZODB-Dev] B-Tree API

[THoffman@indtech.wa.gov.au]

On Tue, 2002-12-03 at 17:54, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > > Make that
> > > 
> > >       if hasattr(seq, 'sort'):
> > >           seq.sort()
> > 
> > That's nice, until I write a class that doesn't sort in-place and 
> > instead returns a sorted copy of the original.
> > 
> > Then again, if I did that, I guess I should use a different name than 
> > 'sort'.
> 
> Exactly.  It would be poor design to have a sort() method on a
> sequence that worked differently than list.sort().
> 
> > I believe the language Ruby has the notion of distinguishing operations 
> > that mutate an object, and those that do not.
> 
> Scheme does too, I believe.  I'm afraid it's a little late to add this
> to Python, except as an optional naming convention.

Maybe that could be an inspectable property of a function/method in
newer versions of python, at least then something like idle with it's
arg hints could also tell you if the method modifies or returns a copy
of the object

T


> 
> --Guido van Rossum (sitting right next to Steve :-)
> 
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