On 3 November 2016 at 01:46, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
But I also recall learning CoffeeScript via cargo-culting a large existing codebase and having not the foggiest ideas when it made sense to use ?. and when plain . was enough. So I think this feature is not very new-user-friendly and I still expect that in the end we'll have two rejected PEPs. 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, and PEP 505 also has the same semantics and explains well why those are the right semantics. So that's another point against this. It's syntactic sugar causing lots of cavities.
Yeah, and so far the protocol based alternative I'm working on hasn't been any less headache-inducing (Mark has been reviewing some early iterations and had to draw a diagram to try to follow the proposed control flow). I think I have a way to simplify that idea further though, and if that works out I should have something I'm willing to share with a wider audience. The gist is that rather than writing the bare: target = expr1 ?? expr2 ?? expr3 You'd instead write None-coalescing as: target = exists(expr1) ?? exists(expr2) ?? expr3 and None-propagating as: target = missing(expr1) ?? missing(expr2) ?? expr3 with ?? being a protocol-driven short-circuiting binary operator controlled by the left operand rather than defining any particular semantics of its own. The "obj?." and "obj?[]" would then be shorthand for particular uses of "missing(obj) ?? ..." that avoid duplicate evaluation of the left operand (as well as bypassing the overhead of actually creating a "missing" instance). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia