On 03/23/2018 03:01 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
Apologies for letting this languish; life has an annoying habit of getting in the way now and then.
My simple response to all of this is that it's not worth it. Each new example convinces me more and more that in almost every case, sublocal assignments DECREASE readability as long as they occur inline. If the statement is very simple, the sublocal assignments make it complex. If it is complex, they do not aid in seeing parallelism between different pieces that reuse the same value, because the sublocal assignment itself creates an asymmetry. The only alternatives that I see as increasing readability are the "rejected" alternatives in which the sublocal assignment is moved "out of order" so that all references to it look the same and are separated from the (single) assignment --- i.e., the variants of the form "x = a+b with a='foo', b='bar'". (I think someone already mentioned this, but these variants, even if rejected, probably shouldn't be placed under the header of "special-casing comprehensions". Extracting the assignment to a with-clause makes sense outside of comprehensions too. It would make more sense to label them as "out of order" or "non-inline" or perhaps "cleft assignment", by analogy with cleft constructions in natural language.)