On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 12:46:58AM +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
There are many things that can be implemented with dunders, yes, but in Python, I would expect these two functions to behave identically:
def f1(x): return frob(x).spam
def f2(x): f = frob(x) s = f.spam return s
This correlation is critical to sane refactoring.
I'm not convinced that this is going to change under the proposal. Since neither f nor s already exist, they cannot overload assignment. Unless something in Nate's proposal is quite different from earlier concrete proposals, I don't think this is a slam-dunk criticism. I think that it is a problem is theory but not in practice. The only risk here is if your refactoring does something silly, such as reusing a variable which overrides assignment: # Earlier: f = something_that_overloads_assignment() # Later on, refactor and re-use f: f = frob(x) # calls overloaded assignment s = f.spam # And then go back to using f process(f) # Oops, shoot yourself in the foot But the loading and pointing of the gun happened earlier, when you re-used an existing variable, not because of assignment overloading. As further evidence that this is not a problem in practice, I give you C++ as a data point. C++ is criticised on many, many grounds, e.g.: http://cshandley.co.uk/CppConsideredHarmful.html but it's quite hard (at least for me) to find any serious criticism of specifically assignment overloading. See for example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=assignment+overloading+considered+harmful https://duckduckgo.com/?q=assignment+overloading+criticism If anyone wants to so their own searches, please let us know if you find any criticism grounded in *actual experience* with assignment overloading rather than theoretical fears. The closest to a practical criticism I have found is this one: http://www.finagle.org/blog/ruby-gotcha-chained-assignment but you'll notice that in this case Ruby's behaviour is exactly the same as Python's, and it involved assignment to an attribute. -- Steven