On 1 November 2016 at 01:51, Mark E. Haase <mehaase@gmail.com> wrote:
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I gather you think you have a deadlock here. The way to break it is to just do it. Pick a syntax and do the rewriting. My memory of some past instances is that many of the senior devs (especially Guido) will "see through the syntax" to evaluate the benefits of the proposal, even if they've said they don't particularly like the initially- proposed syntax.
I don't feel deadlocked, but I think you're right about committing to a syntax. So I updated the PEP, summarized here:
Spelling a new operator as a keyword is difficult due to backward compatibility. It can be done (see PEP-308 and PEP-492) but requires extreme care. A keyword operator is considered less ugly than punctuation, but it makes assignment shortcut syntax very ugly. Assume the coalesce operator is "foo", then the assignment shortcut would be "x foo= y". This is unacceptable. If eliminate the possibility of a keyword and focus on punctuation, we find that most people think "??" — the syntax that exists in several other mainstream languages — is ugly and not Pythonic. However, any other punctuation spelling will be at least as ugly and will not have the benefit of being familiar to programmers who have seen null coalescing in other languages. Therefore, the most reasonable spelling is to borrow the same spelling that other languages use, e.g. "??", "?.", and "?[".
I did go down the road of trying to create a new keyword, trying some mundane ideas ("foo else bar") and some more exotic ideas ("try foo then bar"), but I don't know if those syntaxes are even parseable, and as I worked through a bunch of examples, I realized that all of the keywords I was trying were very awkward in practical use, especially when combined with other expressions.
I do think it would be worth covering the symbol+keyword option discussed in PEP 531 (i.e. "?else" instead of "??", but keeping "?.", and "?[") Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia