Sam
On 04/03/07, Scott Dial
wrote: As for this particular case, it is only useful in a very restricted set of expressions and I was only able to find a handful of cases in stdlib where I could drop in a "if x as y". I believe this is an indication of how rarely one wants to do this. YMMV. [snip] I do think that the majority of use cases will be parsing, or in similar cases where one needs to both test for success and obtain results from the test.
I'm going to agree with Scott Dial on this. You aren't going to need it often enough to warrant this syntax change. Coupled with the potential confusion that Jim Jewett pointed out, and this particular suggestion smells like a misfeature. Also, with the nonlocal declaration that is going to be making it into Python 3 (or was it 2.6?), you can use a closure without a list to do the same thing. def foo(): result = None def do_something(...): nonlocal result ... result = 8 return True if do_something(...): #do something with result ... Then again, closures, assignments in while/if, etc., all smell to me like a way of getting the features of object semantics, without actually using objects. Take your final example and use an object instead. def targetDistributor(actor, rest, info): matcher = Matcher() if matcher.match(target_set_pattern, rest): name, target = matcher.result targetSet(actor, name, target) elif matcher.match(target_clear_pattern, rest): name, = matcher.result targetClear(actor, name) elif matcher.match(target_list_pattern, rest): targetList(actor) else: badSyntax(actor) You know what? That works *today* AND is clearer and more concise than your original code. Even better, it doesn't require a language syntax change. Try using an object for this. You may find that it can do everything that the assignment thing could do. - Josiah