Compound Assignment Operators ( +=, *=, etc...)

[Gordon McMillan]

[posted & mailed]

[Tom Christiansen]
> Mostly it's the old "burnt child fears fire" syndrome.  Or, if you
> would, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".  By
> outlawing it, you can't get burned/fooled by it.  

Right. It is part of Python's stated goals to be "safe as milk" under 
normal usage. (Obviously, all bets are off as soon as you override 
__setattr__, or play with metaclasses).

> As to why there's no x++ there, consider how often people from a
> Pascal(ish) background are confused between x+1 and x++ and ++x, and
> you'll begin to see what kind of problems caused it to be vetoed.

Additional point: If x++ were taken as syntactic sugar, it would have 
the odd affect of modifying a name binding in place. 

If more than syntactic sugar, it would do different things depending 
on whether x was mutable or immutable.

No telling whether either of those would become major conceptual 
stumbling blocks without experimentation. While I like both those 
shortcuts, there are certainly more interesting things to experiment 
with.
 
> But the best reason is probably the one another poster already
> supplied: because Guido didn't like them.  An interesting study
> would be to check the extent to which he also forbids such
> constructs in his own C code. :-)

As you probably expected, when Guido writes C, he writes C. 

- Gordon