[Python-ideas] Null coalescing operator

[Paul Moore]

On 1 November 2016 at 10:11, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I do think it would be worth covering the symbol+keyword option
> discussed in PEP 531 (i.e. "?else" instead of "??", but keeping "?.",
> and "?[")

FWIW, I'm not keen on it.

As a technical question, would it be treated in the syntax as a
keyword, which happened to be made up of a punctuation character
followed by letters, or as a ? symbol followed by a keyword? The
difference would be in how "? else" was treated. If the space is not
allowed, we have a unique situation in Python's grammar (where
whitespace between a symbol and a keyword is explicitly disallowed
rather than being optional). If it is allowed, I suspect a lot of
people would prefer to write "? else" and aesthetically the two seem
very different to me.

Paul