One of the big problems with most of the proposed spellings is that question marks to a learner will feel like truthiness tests and not None tests. I would propose adding a new default statement for the most useful part of this PEP, the ?= assignment

currently:

if x is None:

x = blah

with `?=`:

x ?= blah

with defalult:

default x: blah

This a) makes it obvious even to an amateur python-reader that x will only be changed if it does not yet exist, and b) has no similarity to the truthiness checks involved with the standard meaning of `?` as the ternary operator in many other languages.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 8:30 AM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:24 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 July 2018 at 13:16, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:14 PM, Rhodri James <rhodri@kynesim.co.uk> wrote:
>>> I go with SF fandom's traditional :-) definition: "somebody did it once."
>>> If it's been done more than once, it's an honoured tradition.
>>
>> But if Shakespeare did it, it's just the way the language is.
>>
>> I think Fortran is the programming world's Shakespeare.
>
> Or maybe COBOL:
>
> "And lo from yonder file a record doth appear"...

Hah! But I was thinking of all those uber-obvious features like "a +
b" meaning addition. Those symbols, and the infix style, aren't
"traditions" - they're the baseline that we measure everything else
against. Also, the use of decimal digits to represent literals; if you
*don't* use decimal, you're unusual. (Which makes the Shakespeare
Programming Language [1] an ironic example, since it doesn't use
decimal digits for numeric literals.)

ChrisA
[1] http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list
Python-ideas@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/