[Python-Dev] Adding C ternary select (a?b:c) to Python?
Jim Fulton
jim@digicool.com
Sun, 30 Jan 2000 08:52:32 -0500
Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> Dear developers,
>
> Eric Raymond has sent me the following patch, which adds conditional
> expressions to Python. I'd like to hear opinions on whether this is a
> good thing to add to Python, and whether this is the right syntax.
Yee ha! I think that this is a great idea.
I'm surprised that using the colon doesn't cause problems.
I'm not a grammer lawyer, and don't care that much. I very
much would like to see a conditional expression. I wouldn't
object if it was spelled differently than C's.
> I am a bit skeptical about whether this is sufficiently Pythonic, but
> on the other hand there have always been requests for such a feature,
> and the existing solutions are ugly:
>
> a and b or c
>
> only works when you know for sure that b will never be false, and
>
> (a and [b] or [c])[0]
>
> is dead ugly...
Yup.
(a and (b,) or (c,))[0]
is even worse. ;)
Jim
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