[Python-ideas] Anaphoric if

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Apr 24, 2010, at 11:34 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:
> 
> Well, I suspect I am not alone with having never heard of the term "anaphoric if" (and Google backs me up; this very thread is now search result #4 for [anaphoric if]). It seems to come from the Lisp world and is literally nothing more than syntactic sugar for inlining the assignment statement of what is being tested by an 'if' statement. So no fancy restrictive scoping of the variable; this would be dead-simple syntactic sugar.

The term anaphoric reference seems to be from the field of linguistics.  Wikipedia gives this explanation:
"""
An anaphoric reference, when opposed to cataphora, refers to something within a text that has been previously identified. For example, in "Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly" the word "it" refers to the phrase "the plate".
""" 


Raymond
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