-1, if this goes through it will be extended to all other compound statements over time and we'll end up with 2 or 3 ways to do every thing.
A much better idea would be to find a way to make all compound statements into expressions, future-proofing the decision and avoiding the redundancy between "compound statement statement" and "compound statement expression".
Python's list of compound statements is pretty thin (just 7), and 4 of these already have expression forms. for ==> list comprehension, iterator expression while ==> list comprehension, iterator if ==> if-else conditional expression def ==> already have lambda expressions try ==> my proposal class ==> Okay, so this one doesn't have a compound statement, but where would you use it? with ==> I haven't had an occasion to use with, so can't think of an example where it could be useful as a compound expression. Seems to me try-except is kind of sticking out here, and I've tried to show what I think are natural and common places where a try-except expression would be appropriate. -- ========================== Jeffrey E. McAninch, PhD Physicist, X-2-IFD Los Alamos National Laboratory Phone: 505-667-0374 Email: mcaninch@lanl.gov ==========================