cwarren

Perhaps I should've elaborated a little. Here's a follow-up that I posted on reddit:

both of them violate the user model in subtle ways[1]. Most people don't expect numbers to act as functions. If a bug crops up because of it, more than likely they won't check to see if that's the problem. Again, I'm not against brevity. Just don't make functionality implicit in situations when the programmer isn't expecting it. If you use it so much, use a symbol prefix like `--I don't care. Just make it explicit.

In python's case, it's because it treats tuples and lists differently. Tuples and lists are almost always identical in python. The user's assumption is that they will also be identical in this case, when in fact they aren't.

[1] User interface design is surprisingly helpful when designing programming languages. It's fairly obvious why, but most people don't realize it.

Figure I might as well post this here as well:

Numbers _are not_ functions! This kind of attitude is what gets you python's list formatting operator:

>>> "%s" % ("a string",)

'a string'

>>> "%s" % ["a string"]

"['a string']"

I've been burned by that before, and I'm not exactly stupid.

(I don't think this posted the first time. Forgive me if this turns out to be a double.)

edit: Bah, I can't get this code to format properly. How's that for ironic ;)