On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 1:09 AM, Giampaolo Rodola'
On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 3:38 PM Chris Angelico
wrote: On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 11:35 PM, Giampaolo Rodola'
wrote: On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 2:10 PM Steven D'Aprano
wrote: On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 12:13:04PM +0200, Giampaolo Rodola' wrote:
On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 3:55 AM Steven D'Aprano
wrote: [...] I don't think that "+" is harder to read than "standard_mathematics_operators_numeric_addition"
Please let's drop the argument that + - * / = and ? are the same. [...] But if we insist that every symbol we use is instantly recognisable and intuitively obvious to every programmer, we're putting the bar for acceptance impossibly high.
I personally don't find "a ?? b" too bad (let's say I'm -0 about it) but idioms such as "a?.b", "a ??= b" and "a?[3] ?? 4" look too Perl-ish to me, non pythonic and overall not explicit, no matter what the chosen symbol is gonna be.
Please explain what is not explicit about it. "a?.b" is very simple and perfectly explicit: it means "None if a is None else a.b". What does "not explicit" mean, other than "I don't like this code"?
I find it less explicit mainly because it does 3 things at once: check if attribute is None, use it if it's not None and continue the evaluation from left to right. I find that logic to be more explicit when living on different lines or is clearly delimited by keywords and spaces. ? has no spaces, it's literally "variable names interrupted by question marks" and evaluation can stop at any time while scanning the line from left to right. Multiple "?" can live on the same line so that's incentive to write one-liners, really, and to me one-liners are always less explicit than the same logic split on multiple lines.
Ah, I see what you mean. Well, think about what actually happens when you write "lst.sort()". In terms of "hidden behaviour", there is far FAR more of it in existing syntax than in the new proposals. Which is back to what Steven said: people demand such a high bar for new syntax that few existing pieces of syntax would pass it. ChrisA