[Python-ideas] Null coalescing operators

[Sven R. Kunze]

On 22.09.2015 05:15, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 05:23:42PM -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:
>
>> I agree with Paul Moore that propagating None is generally a bad idea.
> As I understand it, you and Paul are describing a basic, simple idiom
> which is ubiquitous across Python code: using None to stand in for "no
> such value"

There is not a single "no such value". As I mentioned before, when 
discussing NULL values on the RDF mailing list, we discovered 6 or 7 
domain-agnostic meanings.

> when the data type normally used doesn't otherwise have
> something suitable. Consequently I really don't understand what you and
> Paul have against it.

I can tell from what I've seen that people use None for: all kinds of 
various interesting semantics depending on the variable, on the supposed 
type and on the function such as:

- +infinity for datetimes but only if it signifies the end of a timespan
- current datetime
- mixing both
- default item in a list like [1, 2, None, 4, 9] (putting in 5 would 
have done the trick)
- ...

Really?

Just imagine a world where Python and other systems would have never 
invented None, NULLs or anything like that.

> I think you meant to say it merely *postpones* the inevitable 
> exception. But that's wrong, there's nothing inevitable about an 
> exception here. It's not *hard* to deal with "value-or-None". It's 
> just tedious, which is why a bit of syntactic sugar may appeal. 

It's a sign of bad design. So, syntactic sugar does not help when doing 
toilet paper programming (hope that translation works for English).


Best,
Sven