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

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Thu Jun 28 13🔞36 EDT 2018

On 6/28/2018 8:05 AM, Baptiste Carvello wrote:

Le 28/06/2018 à 01:31, Greg Ewing a écrit :

Well, I remain profoundly unconvinced that writing comprehensions with side effects is ever a good idea, and Tim's examples did nothing to change that. Comprehensions with side effects feel scary indeed. But I could see myself using some variant of the "cumsum" example (for scientific work at the command prompt):

x=0; [x:=x+i for i in range(5)]

Creating an unneeded list with a comprehension purely for side effects is considered a bad idea by many.

x = 0 for i in range(5): x += i

Here the side effects are irrelevant, the "x" variable won't be reused.

If we ignore the side effect on x, the above is equivalent to 'pass' ;-)

Perhaps you meant

x = 0 cum = [x:=x+i for i in range(5)]

which is equivalent to

x, cum = 0, [] for i in range(5): x += i; cum.append(x)

But it needs to be initialized at the start of the comprehension.

I would happily get rid of the side-effects, but then what would be a non-cryptic alternative to the above example?

The above as likely intended can also be written

import itertools as it cum = list(it.accumulate(range(5)))

We have two good existing alternatives to the proposed innovation.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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