[Python-Dev] Trinary Operators (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Thu, 06 Feb 2003 14:49:23 -0500

If this is just for fun, why stop with just "trinary"?

(Which BTW is a non-word; the correct term is "ternary".)

How about one of the following (depending on ease of parsing)? These look even more like list comprehension.

x = (e1 if c1 e2 if c2 e3 if c3 ... else d)

Doesn't parse. The concatenation of two expressions is not always distinguishable from a single expression: consider c1 = f and c2 = (1, 2).

x = (e1 if c1 else e2 if c2 else e3 if c3 ... else d)

That works.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)