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Subject: Re: (test) ? a:b
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On 10/22/2014 12:40 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> That's true when it's fundamentally arithmetic. But part of that
> readability difference is the redundancy in the second one. What if it
> weren't so redundant?
>
> 'Negative' if x < 0 else 'Low' if x < 10 else 'Mid' if x < 20 else 'Hig=
h'
>
> You can't easily turn that into a dict lookup, nor indexing. It's
> either a chained if/elif tree or nested if/else expressions, which
> come to the same thing.
No, you can't turn that into a dict lookup, but this is one of the
canonical use cases for the bisect module:

>>> from bisect import bisect
>>> breakpoints =3D [0, 10, 20]
>>> labels =3D ['Negative', 'Low', 'Mid', 'High']
>>> values =3D [-5, 5, 15, 25]
>>> [labels[bisect(breakpoints, value)] for value in values]
['Negative', 'Low', 'Mid', 'High']

It's also worth noting that using bisect is O(log(n)) instead of O(n),
but if you're going to hit a point where the asymptotic behavior matters
I'm sure you will have long since abandoned a manually-written if/elif
chain.

MMR...