About
Exploring Solution Spaces, Keith Ray's blog on Software development and other topics.
Send comments to:
keithray@mac.com
| For Agile Training, eLearning, or Coaching contact: |
| Industrial Logic, Inc. |
| 866-540-8336 (toll free) |
| 510-540-8336 (Berkeley, California) |
| Links |
| xpminifaq |
| Résumé |
| “Adopting XP” Article 2002 (pdf) |
| “ Refactoring” Article 2006 |
| AYE Conference |
| Lucien W. Dupont |
| Elisabeth Hendrickson |
| Johanna Rothman's Managing Product Development |
| Brian Marick's Exploration Through Example |
| Esther Derby's Insights You Can Use |
| Laurent Bossavit's Incipient(thoughts) |
| Dale Emery's Conversations with Dale |
| Martin Fowler's Bliki |
| Creating Passionate Users |
Archives
Subscribe
RSS Exploring Solution Spaces XML
2004.Jan.08 Thu
John Roth, via email, tells me that "multiple-return" like this:
quotient, remainder = divmod(divisor, dividend)
is actually a syntactic short-cut for this:
result = divmod(divisor, dividend) quotient = result[0] remainder = result[1]
The divmod function returns a tuple (an immutable list) and the language automatically unpacks it for you. When I wrote my earlier blog entry, I actually did think of the this "divmod" function... except I couldn't recall the exact name (almost remembered the Forth equivalent, useless in this context), and I was, of course, too lazy to look it up in the Python docs.
Once on comp.lang.smalltalk, there was a discussion on how hard it would be to add increment-assignment to Squeak's Smalltalk compiler. Someone posted the actual code, and it was only a few short modified methods. I expect that automatic-unpacking, ala Python "Multiple-Returns", would also be a small modification to the compiler, that most Smalltalk environments could support each in their own way.
Data Without Meaning
Patrick Logan's weblog has the following:
Jay Han responds to my item on using databases for coordination...
We know that databases provide concurrency control and transaction management. These features let applications share data -- you can call this coordination at low level. But what about coordination at high level? How can they exchange semantics of data? e.g. "9999-12-31 in date field means now? never? forever in the future?" [...]
As long as databases only store data, and don't store whole objects (data+algorithms), they will always risk disassociating meaning and values.