alex.gaynor at gmail
Jul 14, 2012, 10:20 PM
Post #8 of 54
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Re: PEP 0424: A method for exposing a length hint
[In reply to]
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On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin [at] python>
> wrote:
> >> Open questions
> >> ==============
> >>
> >> There are two open questions for this PEP:
> >>
> >> * Should ``list`` expose a kwarg in it's constructor for supplying a
> length
> >> hint.
> >> * Should a function be added either to ``builtins`` or some other
> module which
> >> calls ``__length_hint__``, like ``builtins.len`` calls ``__len__``.
> >
> > Let's try to keep this as limited as possible for a public API.
>
> Length hints are very useful for *any* container implementation,
> whether those containers are in the standard library or not. Just as
> we exposed operator.index when __index__ was added, we should expose
> an "operator.length_hint" function with the following semantics:
>
> def length_hint(obj):
> """Return an estimate of the number of items in obj. This is
> useful for presizing containers when building from an iterable.
>
> If the object supports len(), the result will be exact.
> Otherwise, it may over or underestimate by an arbitrary amount. The
> result will be an integer >= 0.
> """
> try:
> return len(obj)
> except TypeError:
> try:
> get_hint = obj.__length_hint__
> except AttributeError:
> return 0
> hint = get_hint()
> if not isinstance(hint, int):
> raise TypeError("Length hint must be an integer, not
> %r" % type(hint))
> if hint < 0:
> raise ValueError("Length hint (%r) must be >= 0" % hint)
> return hint
>
> There's no reason to make pure Python container implementations
> reimplement all that for themselves.
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan [at] gmail | Brisbane, Australia
>
Sounds reasonable to me, the only issue with your psuedocode (err... I mean
Python ;)), is that there's no way for the __lenght_hint__ to specify that
that particular instance can't have a length hint computed. e.g. imagine
some sort of lazy stream that cached itself, and only wanted to offer a
length hint if it had already been evaluated. Without an exception to
raise, it has to return whatever the magic value for length_hint is (in
your impl it appears to be 0, the current _PyObject_LengthHint method in
CPython has a required `default` parameter). The PEP proposes using
TypeError for that.
Anyways that code looks good, do you want to add it to the PEP?
Alex
--
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to
say it." -- Evelyn Beatrice Hall (summarizing Voltaire)
"The people's good is the highest law." -- Cicero
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