[Python-Dev] vox populii illiterati (original) (raw)

Samuele Pedroni pedronis@bluewin.ch
Sun, 9 Feb 2003 18:25:24 +0100

From: "Tim Peters" <tim.one@comcast.net>

[Neal Norwitz] > ... > One thing to note, many people are saying you can currently do: > > cond and truevalue or falsevalue > > However, many have gotten it wrong, either by reversing the true/false > value or by using something in the truevalue which may be false > (sometimes even constants). pychecker tries to find this condition > (when truevalue is a false constant), but it does a poor job > of determining the idiom IIRC.

Indeed, that's been the most amazing part of the discussion to me. Not so much the form above: everyone gets that wrong in the case truevalue may actually be false, but I don't agree they're prone to swap the values. But virtually everyone got the order wrong when rewriting examples with the weaker (falsevalue, truevalue)[cond] variant (they swap the values in the tuple). That's evidence that the expression-like workarounds don't really work for real people.

does that mean that all the _ and _ or _ in the std lib have been written by bots ?