"?:", "a and b or c" or "iif"

[Andrew Clover]

Robert Meegan (Robert.Meegan at wcom.com) wrote:

> I still don't understand what so many people have against writing simple
> if/else statements.

 Although that's fine in this case, where the result of the expression is
assigned to a variable, that doesn't always happen. For example:

  selectFlavour(nutAllergy ? strawberry : pistachio)

 Would have to be written as:

  if nutAllergy:
    flavour= strawberry
  else:
    flavour= pistachio
  selectFlavour(flavour)

 It think the first version is a lot better, the C-ish ugliness of the symbols
'?' and ':' notwithstanding. Part of the reason is simply that I detest
temporary variables. I want variables to be used to hold varying data and
constants to be used to hold partially calculated values that are used *more
than once* in further calculation. (In a language like Python there is no
particular need for constants and variables to be different in this regard.)
I don't like using variables to hold execution state information.

-- 
This posting was brough to you by And Clover.
(Sorry.)