Karl Knechtel‭

When I have tried to read technical explanations of the syntax rules for programming languages, and when I am trying to decipher error messages, I often encounter the terms expression and statement...

4 answers  ·  posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 2mo ago by Dirk Herrmann‭

Before attempting this, make sure it makes sense in context. In a few particular situations, it would be better to take a different approach rather than using the normal tools for composing or f...

posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Would it discourage others from posting answers, if they saw that a question had an answer with a "works for me" indication applied immediately? (More so than just seeing an immediate, comprehensiv...

3 answers  ·  posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 24d ago by matthewsnyder‭

Import modules rather than names first to avoid a circular reference in the import statements; then use forward declarations, as before, to avoid a circular reference in the type annotations - like...

posted 1mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

I want to write one or more self-answered Q&As on the topic of text encoding in Python, to serve as canonicals and preempt future lower-quality questions. I can think of the following things th...

3 answers  ·  posted 1mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Consider this code example: def example(param=[]): param.append('value') print(param) When example is repeatedly called with an existing list, it repeatedly appends to the list, as ...

3 answers  ·  posted 11d ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 11d ago by Karl Knechtel‭

I think the framing of this question (and the prior discussion) is wrong, and I think that conditions have evolved since it was originally asked - in particular, we can now see how articles have tu...

posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

So far, existing Meta discussion seems to have at least hinted at the possibility of using separate categories here: To shuffle closed questions out of the way (globally for Codidact) (also) Fo...

1 answer  ·  posted 25d ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 24d ago by Lundin‭

Never Too Late Due to, shall we say, recent AI-related hallucinations, pretty much everything that was possible PR-wise in 2019 is possible for this site again. People are leaving Stack Overflow a...

posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Terminology "Mutable default argument" means exactly what the individual words would suggest: it's an argument which is supplied as the default value for that parameter, which also is mutable. To ...

posted 11d ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 11d ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Using the write method The write method of a file offers a much more limited interface. It only accepts one argument - a string, for a file opened in text mode - and outputs just what it's given. ...

posted 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 2mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Use at to schedule the command, using subprocess from Python to invoke at. It doesn't even require shell=True. For example: import shlex, subprocess subprocess.run( # `at` command to run n...

posted 1mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

As the author, this is my defense. Design and modeling are on-topic The site topicality documentation explicitly includes "Software design, architecture, or modeling" as on topic. There doesn't s...

posted 16d ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Workarounds Avoiding mutation Because problems are only caused by actually mutating the default argument, the simplest way to avoid problems is to... not do that. Pythonic code obeys command-quer...

posted 11d ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Possible justifications It may make sense to use a mutable default argument in the following situations: For simplicity Consider for example an argument that should be some kind of mapping, wher...

posted 11d ago by Karl Knechtel‭