On 10/03/2015 05:59 PM, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas wrote:
Meanwhile, you still haven't answered what "return the arguments" should actually mean, given that in Python, "the arguments" are a tuple of positional arguments plus a dict of keyword arguments.
The simplest example is if a function has 5 arguments, then it will return those in the order they are in the signature.
def foo(a, b, c, x=1, y=2): ... return a, b, c, x, y
(a, b, c, x, y) = foo(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) a, b, c, x, y (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
a = foo(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) a (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
But I think that may not be as useful as I was thinking. Only a few functions return the same number of arguments as they take. It would actually be more applicable to filters, where a function is applied to each item, and None might be the default to do nothing with that item.
This whole line of discussion started out as a very tenuous suggestion/possibility. I even said it was going out on a limb, so I really wasn't expecting to defend it as if it was a complete idea.
The concept I am thing of is doable, but not in the way I was thinking at first, but I also think it doesn't fit with python very well.
I think either it isn't doable, or it fits into Python even more poorly than you think. But I'm just one guy, who could easily be wrong. If you think otherwise, I would be interested in seeing what you can come up with. Even if it ends up not being a proposal you'd want to back, it would probably give insights to half the people involved in the larger discussion on null coalescing and null conditionals. And if it turns out that I'm right and you can't make it work, convincing yourself of that might lead to useful insights into the larger discussion that you could share here. After all, it seems like we're kind of stuck on conflicting incomplete intuitions here, and just arguing those back and forth isn't getting us very far.
That's exactly what we are doing. ;-) I doubt I can do better than what's already suggested at this point. Cheers, Ron