[issue9717] operator module - "in place" operators documentation

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> added the comment:

Since Raymond has grabbed this, I will let him decide on its scope.
I agree with sectioning the operator doc and intended to suggest that.

The term 'in-place operation' is fine when accurate. The term 'in-place operator', which is what you wrote and what I criticized, is not as it is never accurate and has confused and mislead people. For one thing, it leads them to forget that augmented assignment statements are statements that *always* do an assignment. For another, they forget that the operation can only be in-place for mutables. That is my observation based on years of reading c.l.p./python-list. An 'in-place operator' would do an operation in-place without any assighment and would only work for mutables. Python has neither operators nor functions nor syntax with those characteristics.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue9717>
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