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! --david