PEP 308: Alternative conditional operator forms

[Dave Brueck]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Carel Fellinger wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 08:23:37AM -0800, Dave Brueck wrote:
> ...
> > Laura, I find your perspective facinating but I still don't quite "get it"
> > (please don't think I'm being sarcastic - I'm *really* trying to
> > understand you but haven't yet). Can you explain a little more what you
> > mean?
>
> I'm no Laura, so I can't explain for here, so I'll add my own musings.
>
> Let's not talk pizza's but Python here.  And let's assume that there
> are 100 Python users out there.
>
> When 50 of those are pro and 50 are contra, then Guido has a problem:)
> Whatever he decides will upset half the population.
>
> On the otherhand, when 1 is pro and 1 is contra and all the others don't
> care, then whatever he decides will be fine with the masses.
>
> In the first case we'd better help him and try to convince the other
> party that our view point* is the right one.  In the other case we
> might as wel stop now and tell Guido to throw dices instead:)  More
> seriously, when the pro's and contra's really are minority groups,
> then it's probably best not to add questionable syntactic sugar
> to the language.

Actually, the point of confusion was around whether or not there was a
need for an explicit 'do not care' vote (versus people simply choosing not
to vote). For most language changes the pro and con camps will _always_ be
minorities because the overwhelming majority of Python users probably
don't follow c.l.py closely, if at all.

-Dave