alt Hacker NewsTangential (but topical in that "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing" is also on the front page):
Is the generated python code in the example wrong?
The prompt
> Develop a Python function that removes any falsey values from a list. Return the modified list without creating a new one.
Is answered with list comprehension, which makes a new list and leaves the original unmodified (never mind that the *args input necessarily can't be a modifiable list?)
def remove_falsey_values(*args): return [val for val in args if val]
def remove_falsey_values(l):
for i in reversed(range(len(l))):
if not l[i]: l.pop(i)
# returned list is linked to input l
return l
a = [1, 0, False, 'foo']
x = remove_falsey_values(a)
x[0] = 2
print(a) # [2,'foo']Replies
Oh I wouldn't be surprised. This is a sample from one of the OSS code datasets I'd used, which are all generated synthetically using LLMs. Data is indeed the moat.
your second function is the type of bad code you get from people trying to program python like its c
def remove_falsey_values(l):
l[:] = (x for x in l if x)
It doesn't fit the requirement to modify the list in place, but the prompt itself contradicts the requirements by asking explicitly for the implementation to use *args and a list comprehension.