From: Aaron Watters
Subject: symbolic constants
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 1994 20:11:08 +0000
Message-ID: <1994Aug9.201108.17864@njitgw.njit.edu>

I find myself using magic numbers a lot in my python experiments

eg: I'm writing a relational algebra interpreter++, based on some
of my theoretical work in databases and I find myself having
to remember that ps[i][1] is the subschema for tuple i whereas
                 ps[i][0] is the name of the tuple variable for tuple i
I'd like to be able to replace 1 and 0 by something more
readable, but I don't want the interpreter to have to do a
variable look-up.  Actually, I hate magic numbers enough I think I'll
live with the variable lookups, but, couldn't symbolic constants be
easily implemented in the language?

Let me know if I'm missing something...
        Aaron Watters
        Department of Computer and Information Sciences
        New Jersey Institute of Technology
        University Heights
        Newark, NJ 07102
                phone (201)596-2666
		fax (201)596-5777
		home phone (908)545-3367
		email: ·····@vienna.njit.edu