On Wed, Nov 02, 2016 at 08:46:54AM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
But first we need to agree on what even the right definition of ?. is. It's been frighteningly difficult to explain this even on this list, even though I have a very clear view in my head,
This is Python-Ideas and with respect to the many fine people on this list, the culture of the list does tend strongly towards over- generalisation which can lead to confusion: it may be hard to understand a proposal when multiple competing/alternative proposals are flying past all at once. That should not necessarily be taken as an argument against the feature itself: once details are locked down, and alternatives dismissed, the feature may not be so hard to understand, even for beginners. Here's my attempt at an explanation. spam?.eggs is simply syntactic sugar for: None if spam is None else spam.eggs It is not a generalised way of catching AttributeError. Nor is it a generalised way of detecting arbitrary empty or missing values. It is specific to None. "spam" can be an expression, not just a name, in which case it is only evaluated once: database.lookup[expensive+calculation]?.attribute only performs the expensive calculation and lookup once. It makes sense to allow ?. to bind "all the way to the right" so that: spam?.eggs.cheese.tomato.aardvark is sugar for: None if spam is None else spam.eggs.cheese.tomato.aardvark The ?[] operator extends this to item lookup: spam?[eggs] is sugar for: None if spam is None else spam[eggs] and the ?? "None-coalescing" operator extends this to general expressions: spam ?? eggs being sugar for: eggs if spam is None else spam Again, spam is only evaluated once. -- Steve