Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote:
Personally, I even slightly prefer
a := 3
to the commonplace
a = 3 because it visually expresses the asymmetry of the operation.
Careful here! That’s a fine argument for using := in a new language, but people using := when they don’t need an expression because they like the symbol better is a reason NOT to do this.
Perhaps you are right and it is indeed unrealistic to expect people to (eventually) shift to using := for simple assignments after 28 years of Python... Then I think it would be also OK to introduce a fully general ":=" but discourage its use in assignment statements. However, it seems strange to forbid the use of one expression (namely ":=") as a statement while all other expressions are allowed. (So there seems no alternative to accepting both = and := in statements, and if I understand you correctly you consider this a problem.) One way or the other, I'd like to underline a point that I made yesterday: I believe that it's important for sanity that taking any existing assignment statement and replacing all occurrences of "=" by ":=" does not have any effect on the program. PEP 572 currently proposes to make ":=" a binary operator that is evaluated from right to left. Christoph