inline assignments in conditionals

[Michael Gilfix]

On Sat, Apr 27 @ 12:33, jaf wrote:
> Writing things that way is really unnatural, at least for English
> speakers.  It makes the intent of the code harder to understand (at
> least for me).  For example, if you were talking to a friend, you
> woudn't say:
> 
>    "If today is Sunday, I'm going to go shopping"
> 
> but rather:
> 
>    "If Sunday is today, I'm going to go shopping"
> 
> and in any case, writing the constant first only protects in the case
> where one of the compared values is a constant.  If you are doing
> 
>    if (a == b):
> 
> then there is no way to protect yourself against actually writing '='.
> 
> Given that, I think not supportig inline assignment is a reasonable
> choice.  Perhaps another option would be to coin a synonymous operator
> that works in comparisons, but is distinct enough from '==' so as not
> to be used by accident?
> 
>    if (data gets socket.recv(1024)):
>       process(data)

  I'm +1 on this (Guido's gonna hate me I bet!). I recently found a
scenario (this was in C and then I thought about how I'd do it in
python) where I wanted to do an assignment only if I reached a certain
point in a bool statement, including short-circuiting.  It just made
my life a lot easier because I didn't have to include redundant
case-code. B-sides, sometimes, you wish you could compress the two
statements.

               -- Mike

-- 
Michael Gilfix
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