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.
def remove_falsey_values(l):
l[:] = (x for x in l if x)your second function is the type of bad code you get from people trying to program python like its c
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.