Hacker News Reader

Comment by hknozcan | Hacker News Reader

We all love short and fast. But this is definitely an interesting approach. I'd love to see similar approaches to problems if you guys can point out to some.

View on HN

You might like the Python Infrequently Answered Questions: http://norvig.com/python-iaq.html (Even if it's a bit old.)

Thanks for that. An enjoyable read. Shame it's so out of date now.

I would also, I love this sort of thing. How about:

    >>> some_boolean = False
    >>> ["Thing 1", "Thing 2"][some_boolean]
    "Thing 1"

Yeah, but unlike the hack in the article, the more readable version of that code,

  "Thing 1" if some_boolean else "Thing 2"

is also almost twice as fast(775 vs 1340 ns, on my machine).

I was more posting it for the "cute hack" value, rather than speed. Speed was significant in the post because the author needed their library to be fast.

the problem with this expression is that it doesn't "short circuit". Both "Thing 1" and "Thing 2" (in this cases object, but the can be function calls) are evaluated before the "some_boolean" usage.

That can be an advantage in some cases, however. Not generally, though.

In particular, if you want the side effects of both operations. Trying to write multiple things while checking if any of them failed, for instance.

Short but I doubt this will be faster as noted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com