Writing a Linear Search algorithm - malformed string representation

[deanhystad]

__str__() doesn't work at all anymore. Call it and you get an Attribute error.

I also think that seek() doesn't work. seek() returns the index of the value in the list, or False if not found. When I see that a function returns False, I think that I can treat the return value as a bool. This does not work for seek().

x = LinearSearch([1, 2, 3])
if (index := x.seek(1)):
    print(1, "found at", index)
else:
    print(1, "is not in list")

Output:
1 is not in list

1 is found at index==0. When I use the .seek() return value as a bool, 0 is treated the same as False. The method works if the value not in the list, or if it is anywhere except the front of the list.

I rewrite my code like this to make it work:

x = LinearSearch([1, 2, 3])
if (index := x.seek(1)) != False:
    print(1, "found at", index)
else:
    print(1, "is not in list")

Output:
1 is not in list

Oops! That doesn't work either. I try this:

x = LinearSearch([1, 2, 3])
if (index := x.seek(1)) is not False:
    print(1, "found at", index)
else:
    print(1, "is not in list")

Output:
1 found at 0

That was found. False == 0, but False is not 0.

Even though seek() technically works, it is too easy to mess up the results. If seek() returns a non-negative integer when it succeeds, I would have it return -1 when it fails, or raise an exception (list.index() does this). Even None makes more sense than returning False.