David Ascher wrote:
Guido van Rossum wrote:
Despite the negative feedback, I've decided to accept the PEP. The most important perceived problem is that newbies tend to write
if x == True: ...
where they should write
if x: ...
I believe this problem should be solved by education (the Zen master hits the student on the head with a stick, and the student gets enlightenment) rather than by holding back what I believe will be a useful feature.
Would it not be "relatively" easy to add a compiler-time warning for most uses of this dangerous idiom?
I think this would be a job for PyChecker. Neal?
Neal just posted that PyChecker deals with it, which is great, but I don't think that PyChecker is enough - until PyChecker is part of the standard distribution and integrated with e.g. the interactive shell, I think that PyChecker is not likely to be used by novices. And we're talking about novices here, right?
Come to think of it, getting PyChecker integrated w/ the interactive shell would be great! Hard, I suspect, but great!
Not too hard: >>> from pychecker import checker >>> import test_bool test_bool.py:6: Comparisions with True are not necessary test_bool.py:7: Comparisions with False are not necessary If you always wanted this, you could add a PYTHONSTARTUP script to do the import or you could add/modify sitecustomize.py. It probably isn't perfect since I don't use this, but it could work. Neal