Indexable get method. [1,2,3].get(4) # None

[oscarbenjamin]

@dg-pb

@oscarbenjamin

if len(items) == 3:
    thing1, thing2, thing3 = items
else:
    thing1, thing2, thing3 = *items, default_value

I don’t see any examples that look like compelling use cases for list.get().

Here is one. This could be done with 3x less code and more readable:

thing1, thing2, thing3 = items[:2], items.get(3, default)

These are not equivalent because this version silently accepts more than 3 items (or it would if the index was corrected).

Also I don’t consider that to be more readable. This is what I meant when I said:

Many of the examples are expressing some nontrivial conditionality that I would want to show more explicitly in an if/else statement

The complexity of most code comes from conditionality. I always want to separate that conditionality from everything else so that it is clearly seen and handled in one place.

@dg-pb

Of course not everyone is so concerned about efficiency, but when writing performant code every little helps.

It’s not about being concerned about efficiency: this seems like the sort of thing that just should not happen in a hot loop. If you want to optimise a hot loop then you decide ahead of time where something is going to be a 2-tuple or a 3-tuple rather than writing a function that doesn’t know what it is going to get.