[Python-Dev] Adding C ternary select (a?b:c) to Python?

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
> Man, you *are* Unfathomable <0.9 wink>!  Even if true, you should
> never have admitted to it <0.1 wink>.

[Greg Wilson]
> I think that's supposed to be <wink fraction="0.9"/>, isn't it?

[Fredrik Lundh]
> not in this case.  quoting a leading bot implementor:
>
>     "We did requirements and task analysis, iterative
>     design, and user testing. You'd almost think emails
>     were an interface between people and bots."
>
> and I can assure you that proving that human beings don't
> like weird but formally well designed syntaxes was the easy
> part of that project... (but don't tell the schemers ;-)

Right on, effbot!  "Bots Helping Bots" is our motto.  I'm quite sure the
timbot's use of <wink> predates the Web's twisted formalization of what
originally started life as a typographic device in a snail-mail newsletter,
when the timbot discovered that "real people" had no idea what to make of
;-) style emoticons.  User testing is exactly on target.  Iterative design,
too:  the timbot's original use of [grin] didn't work nearly as well.  The
introduction of fractional winkery was actually a minor refinement, yet
widely promoted by intuitionists as if it were the key idea.  Feh.

> </F>
>
> "Larry Wall should be shot.  Along with Bill Joy and Eric Allman."
> -- Daniel Finster, on comp.lang.lisp
>
> "Why, just because you guys frittered away a 20-year headstart?"
> -- Larry Wall

Say what you will about Perl, but you gotta love Larry!  I recently filed a
Perl bug that was apparently introduced the day Perl5 hit the streets and
somehow went unnoticed for years, and had a nice exchange with him.  Looking
over other recent bugs, I stumbled into this one first:

    @array = "0" .. -1;

That, of course, computes an array of 100 elements, "0" thru "99":  the
string "0" gets magically autoincremented, as if it were an integer, until
the *length* of the resulting string exceeds the length of the string "-1".
That this wasn't justified as "a feature" gives me hope that Guido's
presence on earth has done *some* little bit of good <wink>.

time-for-an-oil-change-ly y'rs  - tim