Caleb Donovick writes:
I don't really want to change the semantic of =. What Yanghao and I are asking for is an in-place update/assign operator which isn't burdened with numeric meaning.
And what I'm asking for is a justification for that. Python in general has done fine without it for almost 3 decades. I believe you that you have so far not found a way to make a pretty DSL without it, and similarly for Yanghao's HDL. But it's far from obvious that none exists that most Pythonistas would find satisfactory. It's easy to understand why NumPy wanted an additional operator: it's well-known and easily verified by looking at any numerical analysis textbook that matrices can benefit from having notation for a special multiplication operation as well as for all elementwise numerical operations. Making NumPy's job easier makes Python better for literally millions of Python users. So far the request for an in-place update operator seems to fail on both counts. "Need" fails for lack of examples. "Broad benefit" could be implied by "need" and a bit of imagination applied to concrete examples, but on the face of it seems unlikely because of the lack of persistent voices to date, and "need" itself hasn't been demonstrated. Maybe you'll persuade enough committers without examples. Maybe the problem will be solved en passant if the "issubclass needs an operator" thread succeeds (I've already suggested to Yanghao offlist that Guido's suggested spelling of "<:" seems usable for "update", even though in that thread it's a comparison operator). But both would require a lot of luck IMO. Steve