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On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 2:21 AM, Victor Stinner <vstinner@redhat.com> wrote:

Even if the C language allows assignments in if, I avoid them, because
I regularly have to debug my own code in gdb ;-)

I personally haven't written a lot of C, so have no personal experience, but if this is at all a common approach among experienced C developers, it tells us a lot.

We shouldn't add a feature that people would make a point of avoiding!

OT note:

Now the question is which Python are allowed for babies. I recall that
a colleague was surprised and confused by context managers. Does it
mean that try/finally should be preferred?

well, no, because try ... finally is even more confusing -- at least that's the impression I get from spending 20 minutes on it with newbies in my class last night :-)

Or metaclasses?

metaclasses are well known to be advanced juju -- they should not (and probably don't) show up in everyday code. Even if they are used in everyday code, the use is usually hidden -- i.e. when a user subclasses from an ORM model class, they are using metaclasses, but they don't have to know that.

That is -- they fall into the category of stuff that should only be used by library/framework developers -- and, in fact, the whole point is to make everyday code easier.

In fact, the number of developers that need to write/debug metaclasses, context managers, decorators, is far fewer than the number of folks that USE those things. So the standards are very different.

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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