• Avicenna
      link
      fedilink
      English
      211 months ago

      I don’t know, it throws me off but perhaps because I always use len in this context. Is there any generally applicable practical reason why one would prefer “not” over len? Is it just compactness and being pythonic?

        • Avicenna
          link
          fedilink
          English
          211 months ago

          I feel like that only serves the purpose up to the point that methods are not over reaching otherwise then it turns into remembering what a method does for a bunch of unrelated objects.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          111 months ago

          dict

          len also works on a dict.

          The point stands. If you want to check if a value is “empty,” use the check for whether it’s “empty.” In Python, that’s not. If you care about different types of empty (e.g. None vs [] vs {}), then make those checks explicit. That reads a lot better than doing an explicit check where the more common “empty” check would be correct, and it also make it a lot more obvious when you’re doing something special.