[Raymond Hettinger
Thanks Antoine, this is an important point that I hope doesn't get lost. In a language with exceptions, assignment expressions are less needful. Also, the pattern of having of having mutating methods return None further limits the utility.
It doesn't diminish the utility one whit in cases where binding expressions are helpful ;-) What you're saying is that there are _fewer_ such opportunities in Python than in C. Which may or may not be true (depending on the code you're working with). If you believe it is true, fine, then that also argues against that people will rush to abuse the feature (to the extent that it's even plausibly useful less often, to that extent also will there be less temptation to use it at all). But then I only care about use cases at heart, and have presented real-life examples wherein binding expressions read both better and worse than what they're replacing. I intend to limit myself to the cases where they read better :-) Which are most of the cases I even considered, BTW - in the vast majority of cases in real code I'd use them, they'd be replacing the annoyingly bare-bones yet somehow repetitive anyway: value = f() if value; doing something with value with the still bare-bones but minimally repetitive: if value := f(): doing something with value For example, tons of functions I write and use return None or 0 or False when they want to communicate "I have nothing useful to return in this case - but since you expected that might happen, I'm not going to annoy you with an exception". That pattern isn't solely limited to regexp search and match functions. The "win" above is minor but frequent. It adds up. There are other cases where binding expressions really shine, but they're much rarer in all the code I looked at (e.g., see the uselessly ever-increasing indentation levels near the end of `copy()` in the std library's copy.py). In all, I expect I'd use them significantly more often than ternary `if`, but far less often than augmented assignments. If the PEP is accepted, that's what all Pythoneers will be saying 5 years from now ;-)