On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 12:49 PM, Eric V. Smith <eric@trueblade.com> wrote:

>
> self.x = x if x is not None else []
> self.x = x otherwise []

I'm -1 on needing syntax for this, but if we're going to do it, this is
my favorite version I've seen so far. The usual caveats about adding a
keyword apply.

Also feel this is the most intuitive... every other syntax seems really hard to read, however, the caveat I am thinking here is synonym of else and otherwise. We really should go any more complex. Those ? and null with/without exception seems awfully complex to reason. I'd spell out 10 lines if I had to.

If fact, is it bad if we make else working for such brevity?

BTW, this syntax just defeats the example in the PEP:

[PEP 0505 - https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0505/]

This particular formulation has the undesirable effect of putting the operands in an unintuitive order: the brain thinks, "use data if possible and use [] as a fallback," but the code puts the fallback before the preferred value.

John