On 31 October 2016 at 15:51, Mark E. Haase <mehaase@gmail.com> wrote:
Therefore, I have updated the PEP with the punctuation mentioned above, and at this point the PEP can't go any farther. If the best spelling for this new operator is unacceptable, then there's no getting around that. This PEP should be rejected.
While I agree that there's little point arguing over spelling here - if the ? spelling is unacceptable we should just reject - I'm not sure that's the only sticking point remaining here. I still find the short-circuiting behaviour of ?. (and ?[) to be pretty confusing - and the fact that there's a long paragraph describing the behaviour, with lots of examples of the form "if you think that this example works like so, then you're wrong, and it actually does the following", suggests to me that I'm not going to be the only one struggling. Hopefully, the problem is simply the way the behaviour is presented, and a reworking of the description would make it all crystal clear - but it feels to me that there's some inherent complexity here that's an actual issue with the proposal. Having said that, it appears that the proposed behaviour is the same as in C# (can you just come out and say "C#", rather than hinting with the phrase "other popular languages" - if we're stealing the behaviour as is from C#, let's say so, and if not, can you include examples from more than one language?) Assuming that's the case, then the fact that it's not causing confusion to C# programmers is a definite point in its favour. Paul