Re: How much sanity checking is required for function inputs?

From	Christopher Reimer <christopher_reimer@icloud.com>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.python
Subject	Re: How much sanity checking is required for function inputs?
Date	2016-04-23 18:45 -0700
Message-ID	<mailman.20.1461462339.32212.python-list@python.org> (permalink)
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On 4/22/2016 1:40 PM, Michael Selik wrote:
> Frankly, for someone coming from Java, the best advice is to not write any
> classes until you must. Of course classes in Python are very useful. It's
> just that your Java habits are unnecessary and often counter-productive.

I disagree. I wrote procedural scripts and translated old BASIC games 
into Python for two years. One day I came across a Python book that 
described the principles of subclassing from a base class for chess 
pieces, but there was no code to demonstrate the process. I had no 
problem creating the Python classes. That's how my research project got 
started to build a chess engine. If you ever check the academic 
literature for chess programming, this research project could turn into 
a lifelong endeavor.

I had to confront all the bad habits I brought over Java and change my 
code to be more Pythonic. This is where I started having fun, learning 
the tricks and collapsing multi-line code into a single line code. I've 
learned more about Python in the few weeks than I had in two years of 
writing procedural scripts and translating BASIC goto hell.

Thank you,

Chris R.

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Re: How much sanity checking is required for function inputs? Christopher Reimer <christopher_reimer@icloud.com> - 2016-04-23 18:45 -0700

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