[Python-Dev] conditional expressions? (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@home.com
Mon, 15 Oct 2001 14:59:21 -0400

[Skip Montanaro]

Regardless whether or not you think this could make it into 2.2b1, I hope if you proceed it will get a PEP a reasonable amount of time before the CVS checkin... <0.1 wink>.

Guido can exempt himself from the PEP process if he feels like it. If he does, I expect I'll be in the "retroactive PEP" business again.

It seems downright weird to me that the syntactic baggage necessary to write a conditional expression is greater the the baggage necessary to write an if statement (new "then" keyword, parens required for disambiguation).

There are many ways a conditional expression could be spelled. This is aiming at the easiest way to read; harder-to-read ways could be introduced with less disruption of the kinds you're focusing on.

The parens function pretty much as "{...}" in C, Java, Perl, etc.

Sorry, I don't see the resemblance.

It's a step away from indentation-based block structure and toward delimiter-based block structure.

Ditto.

If you add it, I think it will be harder to justify the lack of delimiter-based block stucture at the statement level. It will just be one more argument in the arsenal of people whose knee-jerk reaction to Python's block structure is to whine about it.

I'm not concerned about 21 bad arguments versus 20 .