On 1/27/2011 10:24 PM, Mateusz Czaplinski wrote:
The anxiety is likely because the first document newbies get hold of is the reference manual in the sources. Trouble is, these things become really clear when there are a lot of samples or recipes to examine. The ref man does not really help with that; the PIL book is the one to read. Or the wiki. Same with weak tables...On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 11:20 AM, steve donovan wrote:On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Axel Kittenberger wrote:any content of metatables? My guess that newbies are so freightened from metas is just exactly the __syntax.Hm, I don't think newbies should worry themselves about metatables. They are a subtle concept and the underscores are the least part.Personally, I do agree with that view.
But they are just conventions right? I don't think that's really an issue. Looking at code samples is the way to banish all those anxieties. Remember how we start to learn the Win32 API? We run a program to create a basic window and we have no idea what all those parameters really do, but eventually we muddle along fine helped by a ton of code snippets...I'd also like to note, that AFAI remember, Python does also give some sematic meaning to a double-underscore prefix (I think that's for private fields in a class, and their names are internally suffixed with something special in such a case). So there are at least two members in this club.
-- Cheers, Kein-Hong Man (esq.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia