On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 5:35 AM Eric V. Smith <eric@trueblade.com> wrote:

On 5/20/2020 8:23 AM, James Lu wrote:
> What's wrong with my := proposal?
Confusion with unrelated uses of the walrus operator.

What's wrong with confusion with the walrus operator?  

- If you are confused and don't know what walrus operator is, you google it and find that in a function header it means late assignment.

- If you are confused and think it's referring to the walrus operator's use for inline variable assignment - well so what - it is being used as assignment here!

- If you are confused and think := is binding at import-time rather than call-time - well you already are a somewhat advanced python user to be thinking about that and the use of a different syntax to bind the argument should trigger you to google it. 

I think every proposal, especially for syntax and operators, should be judged on how confusing it is to new and experienced users alike. In my mind, using the walrus operator for early binding utterly fails that test, but of course other people will have different opinions.

The fact that operators are notoriously difficult to search for doesn't help any.

Eric