On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 04:10:10PM +0200, Michel Desmoulin wrote:
The thing with those details is that you can completly ignore them, and don't know they exist, and simply look it up when you need it. What Google search terms would a Python programmer use to find out what
{"1": a, "foo.bar": b, **c} = **mapping
does?
Please don't dismiss the effect of unfamiliar syntax on the reader. Adding more magic syntax increases the cost and difficulty of reading the code and learning the language. That cost might be justified if the new syntax is useful enough, but so far this syntax appears to be of very marginal usefulness. There's no obvious use-case where it would be an overwhelming benefit, at least not yet. +1 With tuple and list unpacking (a,b) = (1,2) [a,b] = [1,2] # or even mixing: [a,b] = (1,2)
On 26/05/2016 18:51, Steven D'Aprano wrote: the structure of the LHS and RHS mirror each other, making the meaning intuitive/obvious. Doing the same thing for dicts: { 'a' : a, 'b' : b } = { 'a' : 1, 'b' : 2 } makes the LHS too verbose to be very useful IMO. All the examples so far can be done in other, arguably better, ways. While a more concise syntax would break the "mirroring" and be confusing, or at least more to learn as Steven says.
I believe this syntax comes from Clojure. Can you give some examples of real-world code using this syntax in Clojure? (Not toy demonstrations of how it works, but working code that uses it to solve real problems.)
If Clojure programmers don't use it, then I expect neither will Python programmers.