Programmer Humor

36678 readers

22 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

521

The meaning of this (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] funkless_eck 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

_ (sic) as a variable name is often used when a function returns multiple outputs but you only want one

 def my_function:
      return 1, 2, 3

 _, two, _ = my_function()

[–] ryedaft 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Underscore alone is a special variable name and I'm pretty sure anything assigned to it goes straight to garbage collection. Whereas _myvariable is typically used to indicate a "private" class variable or method (Python doesn't have private so it's just a convention).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

_ can also be used in the python interactive terminal to mean 'last return value'

Ie:

> 'string'
'string'
> a = _
> print(a)
string