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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Dirk Herrmann‭

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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 1y 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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

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 ...

4 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 12mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

These two uses of if are different The if at the end of a list comprehension syntax: [num for num in hand if num != 11] is a filter; its purpose is to decide whether or not the resulting list ...

posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 12mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

My actual motivation is to understand the semantics of the .gitignore file syntax in precise detail, for a program which is expected to emulate them as accurately as possible. However, while coming...

1 answer  ·  posted 12mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 12mo ago by Peter Taylor‭

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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 1y 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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

No. Terms like "too generic", "unclear", "too broad", "off topic" are absolutely not euphemisms for "stupid question, go away". They mean what they say; and when they are used Somewhere Else, mult...

posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Suppose I have some code in a file myscript.py like: def my_function(): print("Test") What steps do I need to take in order to make my_function run? That is to say: how do I get Python to ...

2 answers  ·  posted 7mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 5mo ago by Michael‭

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 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Lundin‭

How to do it Yes, Python has an equivalent operator. However, it's spelled with keywords rather than punctuation, and it uses a different order of operands. It looks like: condition_value if some...

posted 12mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

As part of a general effort to produce basic Q&As for Python, recently I've been focused on issues related to starting up an interpreter and running the code - so, questions about setting up an...

0 answers  ·  posted 5mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭