On 26 April 2018 at 15:38, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 3:34 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Can you give an example of a Python expression, involving PEP 572 binding-expressions, that is not a tree but a more general DAG or that contains cycles?
A DAG is a directed *acyclic* graph, so it still can't contain cycles. But I have no idea what kind of expression isn't a tree as a consequence of having an assignment in it.
At a parsing level, the expression remains a tree, it's just that one of the nodes is a name lookup. At a logical level though, binding expressions do indeed mean that expressions involving binding expressions are at least arguably better modelled with a DAG rather than as a tree the way they are now: # The arithmetic expression is a tree including two nodes that look up "c". The DAG is only needed at a statement level. c = expr() a*c + b*c # Whereas this backref to "c" pulls the DAG down to the expression level a*(c := expr()) + b*c Historically, that kind of order-of-evaluation dependence in Python has only been a problem for functions with side effects, so the folks asking that this be seen as a major complexity increase for expression level semantics have an entirely valid point. The PEP aims to address that point by saying "Don't use binding expressions when the order of evaluation would be ambiguous", but that's as a response to a valid concern, not a dismissal of it. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia