PyWart: Language missing maximum constant of numeric types!

Fri Feb 24 12:32:08 EST 2012

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
> The only time I've naively pined for such a thing is when
> misapplying C idioms for finding a minimum value.
>> Python provides an excellent min implementation to use instead.

min can be a little inconvenient. As soon as anything complicated has
to be done during the min expression, you need to switch to using
something else for sanity's sake. In that vein, I do actually
sometimes use float('inf') (for numbers), or a custom max/min object.
----
Silly and completely nonserious addendum:
Forgive me, I have spoken in error! min is the one true way, for you
can still do it with a little wrangling, as follows:
 @operator.itemgetter(1)
 @min
 @apply
 def closest_object():
 for x in xrange(board_width)
 for y in xrange(board_height):
 try:
 entity = board.get_entity(x, y)
 except EntityNotFound:
 pass
 else:
 yield distance(player.pos, entity.pos), entity
Please don't kill me.
-- Devin