Viewing profile — grifaton

Sounds like you're looking for a Sufficiently Smart Compiler[0]. James Hague has a good piece on why this might not be so desirable[1]. One of the reasons I'm fond of Python is tha…

I don't think anybody's suggesting that Dawkins called Skepchick "Muslima".

I'm afriad this doesn't make much sense from a Python point of view, where a metaclass is a very specific language construct. For more details, you can't do much better than the St…

This has obviously been a mammoth effort, so congratulations to all involved!

Seriously?

Looks like it'll cover similar ground to his Europython keynote (which I think was a rehash of his Pycon talk), a video of which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw…

I'm puzzled by the references to paper/scissors/stone. Why is "stone" the "most obvious move"? Later on, the paper states that the game is "well known to be power law distributed".…

Really? The UK's centre of population [0] is apparently Appleby Parva in Leicestershire [1], which is less than 25 miles from Coventry [2]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_…

I blogged about this, and other uses for mutable default arguments (with tongue somewhat in cheek) a few weeks ago: http://inglesp.github.com/2012/03/24/mutable-default-argumen...

Here's a rare example of obfuscated python, deceptively called "Python's Ellipsis Explained": http://blog.brush.co.nz/2009/05/ellipsis/

I sometimes use zip as a poor man's matrix transposition operator: >>> m = [(1,2,3), (4,5,6), (7,8,9)] >>> zip(*m) [(1, 4, 7), (2, 5, 8), (3, 6, 9)]

This would catch a SyntaxError raised by eval(). For example, try: eval(".") except: pass

Sample bias?

I think this is interesting because it's the first time I've seen "hacking" presented in a positive light in the media.