Algorithm.co.il » rants http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs Algorithms, for the heck of it Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:37:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Debugging in IE. http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/programming/debugging-in-ie/ http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/programming/debugging-in-ie/#comments Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:12:49 +0000 lorg http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/?p=257 I did something I shouldn’t have done: from JavaScript, I appendChildNodes()-ed some text and an img to an existing img. I apologize. Firefox told me it was OK. To put it more accurately, Firefox didn’t tell me anything, and just … Continue reading →
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]]> I did something I shouldn’t have done: from JavaScript, I appendChildNodes()-ed some text and an img to an existing img. I apologize. Firefox told me it was OK. To put it more accurately, Firefox didn’t tell me anything, and just didn’t show the text and the img, which was what I wanted it to do. IE really didn’t like it.

Finding out what IE was so upset about wasn’t fun, as I didn’t have a debugger for IE. So I started looking for one. Not wanting to install visual studio just for that, I installed(*) “Microsoft Script Debugger”, which is one old piece of software. It’s so old that its readme states that it works with IE 4. At least it works. It lacks watches and some other features you’d expect from a debugger (which Firebug has!), but it got the job done. Mostly.

I wasted about 40 minutes on that issue.

* Installing “Microsoft Script Debugger”, contrary to what some my tell you, does not require installing old office versions. I followed a download link on Microsoft’s website, and got it. It does require some voodoo if you’re running Vista, but nothing too hard to handle.

]]> http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/programming/debugging-in-ie/feed/ 1 A Python Rant http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/programming/a-python-rant/ http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/programming/a-python-rant/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:46:22 +0000 lorg http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/?p=197 Last night I encountered yet again one of Python’s annoyances. The annoyance I’m referring to is the lack of string like functions for lists. Trivial examples include find() and rfind(). Before you mention index though, it’s important to point out … Continue reading →
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]]> Last night I encountered yet again one of Python’s annoyances.
The annoyance I’m referring to is the lack of string like functions for lists. Trivial examples include find() and rfind(). Before you mention index though, it’s important to point out that index() checks for equality. I’d be much happier if instead it could take a function argument for comparisons.
A less trivial example is split(), also with a possible criterion argument. A complicated example is regular expressions.

It seems that most of these functions, when applied to lists should take at least a function argument. Maybe regular expressions for lists would be better with a key argument though.
This reminds me a bit of C++’s generic algorithms for collections.

On a similar subject, it would have been nice, if along with heapq, bisect functions would receive a key argument.

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