I experimented with Python in college and I've been for close to 20 years now. (Coming and going as needed) I love the language. But there is one annoyance that I continually run into.
There are basically two assignment operators, based on context, = and :
a = 1
{ a: 1 }
So the latter is not an assignment. `=` is an assignment as it creates a new entry in a namespace, while the later just associates a key with a value in a dictionary.
They cannot be used interchangeably:
a: 1 # error
{a=1} # error
I don't think I should be this way.
But it's on purpose as they do different things. Thanks for sharing the idea but I don't see this changing.
-Brett
There are times when I have a bunch of variables that I want to collect into an object or destructure. This involves adding commas, and swapping the :/=. I don't have a good fix for the adding of commas (maybe a newline?)
but I think : should at least be accepted as = everywhere except in ifs:
a: 1 # same as a = 1
One area where it might help (although the python parser already catches it) is in ifs:
if a:1 # always error ?
if a=1 # currently error, but might be accepted shorthand for == ?
Ideally, I could take
a: 1
b: 2
then in 3 edits:
1. first line prepend 'x: {'
2. last line append '}'
3. indent between { }
I guess his would imply that { open up an assignment scope, where newlines are commas if the last line did not end with an operator or the next line did not start with an operator:
x: {
a: x - # - operator
f(x)
b: # : operator
5487234728394720348988734574357
c: 7 # c is 13, no trailing operator but next line has a preceding operator
+ 6
}
The only issue then is how do we address a?
x.a # looks fine to me
x['a'] # as a dict, but the conversion of a to string 'a' could be confusing.
Additionally, I was also thinking about : as an implied await:
a = await f() # await generator
a: f() # await generator, or direct assignment if return type is not a generator/async func
Thoughts? Please be gentle :-)
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