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From: Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2013 18:29:13 -0700
Subject: Re: Implicit conversion to boolean in if and while statements
To: Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohnson@gmail.com>
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On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Rick Johnson
<rantingrickjohnson@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, February 8, 2013 6:05:54 PM UTC-6, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> The sum builtin works happily on any sequence of objects
>> that can be added together. It works as an excellent
>> flatten() method:
>>
>> >>> nested_list = [["q"], ["w","e"], ["r","t","u"], ["i","o","p"]]
>> >>> sum(nested_list,[])
>> ['q', 'w', 'e', 'r', 't', 'u', 'i', 'o', 'p']
>> >>> nested_list
>> [['q'], ['w', 'e'], ['r', 't', 'u'], ['i', 'o', 'p']]
>
> What the hell? Oh yeah, you must be using pike again. No, if it were pike the list would look like this:
>
> ({({"q"}), ({"w","e"}), ({"r","t","u"}), ({"i","o","p"})})
>
> Of course you'd have to declare it first using an /expanded/ Java syntax:
>
>  nested_list = array(array(string))
>
> Folks, i couldn't make this stuff up if i wanted to. Go read for yourself if want a few laughs.

Classic ad hominem.  Try to make your opponent look bad by making fun
of them on a completely unrelated topic, and then hope that nobody
notices that you entirely ignored the substance of their argument.
Sorry, it didn't work.

You didn't even do a good job of it.  Yes, Pike uses two characters
instead of one to wrap array literals.  Big friggin' whoop.  On the
minus side, it's a little more typing.  On the plus side, they stand
out better, and you don't have the [] characters doing double duty
denoting list literals and indexing alike.  Yes, Pike writes **string
as the more readable array(array(string)) -- although if my memory
serves correctly the former is also legal syntax.  Again, nobody
cares.  And by the by, Pike is a descendant of C, not Java.  Its
predecessor LPC predates Java by about 6 years.  If you're going to
start lambasting others' preferred programming languages in an effort
to make yourself look good, you can at least get your facts straight.