Alex Martelli strung bits together to say:
I don't think we should encourage that sort of thing with the "implicit assignment" in accumulation.
So, if it's an accumulation syntax we're going for, I'd much rather find ways to express whether we want [a] no assignment at all (as e.g for union_update), [b] plain assignment, [c] augmented assignment such as += or whatever. Sorry, no good idea comes to my mind now, but I _do_ think we'd want all three possibilities...
I had a similar thought about 5 minutes after turning my computer off last night. The alternative I came up with was: y = (from result = 0.0 do result += x**2 for x in values if x > 0) The two extra clauses (from & do) are pretty much unavoidable if we want to be able to express both the starting point, and the method of accumulation. And hopefully those clauses would be enough to disambiguate this from the new syntax for generator expressions. The 'from' clause would allow a single plain assignment statement. It names the accumulation variable, and also gives it an initial value (if you don't want an initial value, an explicit assignment to None should suffice) The 'do' clause would allow single plain or augmented assignment statements, as well as allowing any expression. 'from' is already a keyword (thanks to 'from ... import ...') and it might be possible to avoid making 'do' a keyword (in the same way that 'as' is not a keyword despite its use in 'from ... import ... as ...') (And I'll add my vote to pointing out that generator expressions don't magically eliminate the use of the reduce function or accumulation loops any more than list comprehensions did. We still need the ability to express the starting value and the accumulation method). Cheers, Nick. P.S. I'm heading off to Canberra early tomorrow morning, so I won't be catching up on this discussion until the weekend. -- Nick Coghlan | Brisbane, Australia ICQ#: 68854767 | ncoghlan@email.com Mobile: 0409 573 268 | http://www.talkinboutstuff.net "Let go your prejudices, lest they limit your thoughts and actions."