On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 8:41 PM, Steven D'Aprano
It's a funny thing, I'm usually not a huge fan of symbols outside of maths operators, and I strongly dislike the C ? ternary operator, but this one feels really natural to me. I didn't have even the most momentary "if you want Perl, you know where to find it" thought.
I do, but at least the '?' is part of an operator, not part of the name (as it is in Ruby?). I really, really, really don't like how it looks, but here's one thing: the discussion can be cut short and focus almost entirely on whether this is worth making Python uglier (and whether it's even ugly :-). The semantics are crystal clear and it's obvious that the way it should work is by making "?.", ?(" and "?[" new operators or operator pairs -- the "?" should not be a unary postfix operator but a symbol that combines with certain other symbols. Let me propose a (hyper?)generalization: it could be combined with any binary operation, e.g. "a?+b" would mean "None if a is None else a+b". Sadly (as hypergeneralizations tend to do?) this also leads to a negative observation: what if I wanted to write "None if b is None else a+b"? (And don't be funny and say I should swap a and b -- they could be strings.) Similar for what if you wanted to do this with a unary operator, e.g. None if x is None else -x. Maybe we could write "a+?b" and "-?x"? But I don't think the use cases warrant these much. Finally, let's give it a proper name -- let's call it the uptalk operator. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)