Re:Python has brought computer programming to a vast new aud...
by eesmith on Saturday July 21, 2018 @04:29PM
(#17583705)
You wrote "These are all extremely helpful".
I disagree, in that I think they are only somewhat helpful. If we only had double-quoted strings, and not single-quoted strings, then I think there would be little difference to the language or its quality of use.
Going back to the question of "why st_mtime?" - that's because os.stat() is a wrapper around the POSIX stat(2) system call. My FreeBSD man page defines it as:
st_mtim Time when file data last modified. Changed by the mkdir(2),
mkfifo(2), mknod(2), utimes(2), write(2) and writev(2) sys-
tem calls.
These are all extremely helpful, though. All of those quote combinations are equivalent, and can be used to prevent having to escape quotes within the string. The u prefix is gone from Python 3, r is a raw string (which many other languages have, like C#'s @ prefix), and f is a new feature which generated a lot of debate but basically allows interpolation similar to Ruby and ES6.
>The one I have in mind is the os library, which I use a lot (like why st_mtime?).
That's the one I thought you were going to bring up. I agree the naming conventions in the os module have a lot of warts. The function names could use a refresh.