[Python-Dev] PEP 572: Assignment Expressions (original) (raw)

Anthony Flury anthony.flury at btinternet.com
Sat Apr 21 07:48:45 EDT 2018

On 21/04/18 11:18, Chris Angelico wrote:

But you haven't answered anything about what "readable" means. Does it mean "if I look at this code, I can predict what dis.dis() would output"? Or does it mean "this code clearly expresses an algorithm and the programmer's intent"? Frequently I hear people complain that something is unreadable because it fails the former check. I'm much more interested in the latter check. For instance, this line of code expresses the concept "generate the squares of odd numbers":

[x*x for x in range(100) if x % 2] But it doesn't clearly express the disassembly. Is that a problem? Are list comprehensions a bad feature for that reason? I don't think so. ChrisA

For what it worth - readability for me is all about understanding the intent. I don't care (most of the time) about how the particular code construct is actually implemented. When I am maintaining code (or trying to) I need to understand what the developer intended (or in the case of a bug, the gap between the outcome and the intention).

One of the challenges about readability is it partially depends on skill level - for a beginner the comprehension may well be baffling where as someone with more skills would  understand it - almost intuitively; as an example: I have been using Python for 7 years - and comprehensions with more than one for loop still are not intuitive for me, I can't read them without an amount of deep thought about how the loops work together.

--

Anthony Flury email : Anthony.flury at btinternet.com Twitter : @TonyFlury <https://twitter.com/TonyFlury/>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list