[Python-ideas] PEP 505 (None coalescing operators) thoughts

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 28.09.2015 23:49, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 2:06 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
>> I’m not a big fan of the punctuation though. It took me a minute to
>> realize that post?.tag.lower() was saying if post is None, not if post.tag
>> is None and I feel like it’s easy to miss the ?, especially when combined
>> with other punctuation.
>>
> 
> But that's a different point (for the record I'm not a big fan of the ?
> either).

Me neither.

The proposal simply doesn't have the right balance between usefulness
and complexity added to the language (esp. for new Python programmers
to learn in order to be able to read a Python program).

In practice, you can very often write "x or y" instead of
having to use "x if x is None else y", simply because you're
not only interested in catching the x is None case, but also
want to override an empty string or sequence value with
a default. If you really need to specifically check for None,
"x if x is None else y" is way more expressive than "x ?? y".

For default parameters with mutable types as values,
I usually write:

def func(x=None):
    if x is None:
        x = []
    ...

IMO, that's better than any of the above, but perhaps that's
just because I don't believe in the "write everything
in a single line" pattern as something we should strive
for in Python.

The other variants (member and index access) look like
typos to me ;-)

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