[Python-3000] Test and Assign [was: More wishful thinking]

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/16/06, Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:
> I'm really more interested in the general case where you have a test, and
> then you have the results of the test. It would be nice to put the conditional
> statement first, and then once you know that the test succeeded, start to
> look at the specific details.

I think Skip's response applies equally here. This is an old chestnut;
many folks have barked upon this tree in the last 15 years, without
being able to crack this nut.

Unless you have a concrete solution (short of allowing '=' in
expressions :-) there's no solution and you're wasting everybody's
time for explaining how useful it would be. This is different from
e.g. unpacking syntax because that's a concrete solution, it just
needs to be shown that the extra complexity added to the language is
made up for by more readable code, and not offset by more bugs; or
something like that.

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)