On 9/21/2015 1:07 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I apologize for having misunderstood the status of your PEP. I think it would be great if you finished the PEP. As you know the ? operator has its share of fans as well as detractors, and I will happily wait until more of a consensus appears.
Add me to the detractors of what I have read so far ;-). In arithmetic, 1/0 and 0/0 both stop the calculation. My hand calculator literally freezes until I hit 'on' or 'all clear'. Early computers also stopped, maybe with an instruction address and core dump. Three orthogonal solutions are: test y before x/y, so one can do something else; introduce catchable exceptions, so one can do something else; introduce contagious special objects ('inf' and 'nan'), which at some point can be tested for, so one can do something else. Python introduced 'inf' and 'nan' but did not use them to replace ZeroDivisionError. Some languages lacking exceptions introduce a contagious null object. Call it Bottom. Any operation on Bottom yields Bottom. Python is not such a language. None is anti-contagious; most operations raise an exception. I agree with Paul Moore that propagating None is generally a bad idea. It merely avoids the inevitable exception. Or is it inevitable? Trying to avoid exceptions naturally leads to the hypergeneralization of allowing '?' everywhere. Instead of trying to turn None into Bottom, I think a better solution would be a new, contagious, singleton Bottom object with every possible special method, all returning Bottom. Anyone could write such for their one use. Someone could put it on pypi to see if there how useful it would be. I agree with Ron Adam that the narrow issue is that bool(x) is False is sometimes too broad and people dislike of spelling out 'x is not None'. So abbreviate that with a unary operator; 'is not None', is a property of objects, not operators. I think 'x!' or 'x?', either meaning 'x is not None', might be better than a new binary operator. The former, x!, re-uses ! in something close to its normal meaning: x really exists. -- Terry Jan Reedy