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

Jeff Hardy jdhardy at gmail.com
Wed Sep 30 18:41:53 CEST 2015


On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <
alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 7:57 PM, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas <
> python-ideas at python.org> wrote:
>
>> If this is going to be a keyword rather than a symbol, it really has to
>> read like English, or at least like abbreviated English,
>
>
> I am -1 on this whole idea, but the keyword that comes to mind is "def":
>
> x def []
>
> may be read as x DEFaulting to [].
>

'def' is currently short for 'define', which would be too confusing.
Spelling out 'default' isn't so bad, though:

    self.x = x default []

And if it's going to be that long anyway, we might as well just put a
`default` function in the builtins:

    self.x = default(x, [])

I actually really like 'otherwise', but it's certainly not brief:

    self.x = x if x is not None else []
    self.x = x otherwise []

That said, it's not used *that* often either, so maybe it's acceptable.

- Jeff
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