I was just practicing some Linked List questions when I came across something I couldn’t explain. So I was wondering if anyone could help me out.
If I have a Linked List with nodes implemented as follows
class Node: def __init__(self, val, next): self.val = val self.next = next
I tried reversing the Linked List initially like so and it came up with an AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'next'
prev = None curr = head while curr: prev, curr, curr.next = curr, curr.next, prev
And then I modified it to and it worked but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.
prev = None curr = head while curr: curr.next, prev, curr = prev, curr, curr.next
I’m aware that Python evaluates the RHS as a tuple and then assigns the values on the LHS from left to right but I can’t seem to understand why both code snippets wouldn’t be the same if this is the case.
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Answer
You might want to visualize things the following way:
Your first code is equivalent to:
prev = None curr = head while curr: tmp = curr, curr.next, prev prev = tmp[0] curr = tmp[1] curr.next = tmp[2]
whereas your second code is equivalent to:
prev = None curr = head while curr: tmp = prev, curr, curr.next curr.next = tmp[0] prev = tmp[1] curr = tmp[2]
you see the difference is, that in one case you first change curr
and then you assign to curr.next
, whereas in the other case
you first change curr.next
and then reassign curr
.
python executes nothing in parallel.
It has to chose an order which is left to right for the variables to be assigned to.