[Python-Dev] Informal educator feedback on PEP 572 (was Re: 2018 Python Language Summit coverage, last part) (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sun Jun 24 10:52:04 EDT 2018

On Sun, Jun 24, 2018 at 05:24:12PM +0300, Ivan Pozdeev via Python-Dev wrote:

An expression is intuitively thought to be self-contained i.e. without side effects. if I write a=b+1, I'm not expecting it to do anything except assigning `a'.

a = d.pop(1) a = d.setdefault(key, 0) chars_written = file.write(text)

Expressions with side effects has long since proven to be problematic because of the implicit (thus hard to see and track) links they create (and because the result depends on the order of evaluation).

If you're going to take a hard-core functional approach to side-effects, I think you are using the wrong language. Nearly everything in Python could have side-effects (even if usually it won't).

Even your own example of "b+1" (depending on what b.add does).

Moreover, Python's other design elements have been consistently discouraging expressions with side effects, too (e.g. mutator methods intentionally return None instead of the new value, making them useless in expressions),

I don't think that's the reason why mutator methods return None. They return None rather than self to avoid confusion over whether they return a copy or not.

https://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-doesn-t-list-sort-return-the-sorted-list

so the proposition is in direct conflict with the language's design.

Python is full of operations with side-effects.

Besides, they're not quite useless:

(alist.append() or alist)

is functionally equivalent to alist.append returning self. Just a bit more verbose.

Methods (and functions) all return a value, even if that value is None, so they can be used in expressions. If Guido wanted Pascal style procedures, which cannot be used in expressions, we would have them by now :-)

-- Steve

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list