For review: PEP 308 - If-then-else expression

[Anthony Baxter]

>>> Piet van Oostrum wrote
> It just dawned on me that the 'if' is not really necessary.
> "->" would be a more pythonic operator than "?" I think, because it stands
> out more. And indeed it looks a bit strange to have the other part as a
> keyword.
> 
> What about:
>         condition -> (true part, false part)
> The (,) is not a tuple here but it belongs to the -> and the -> says to
> select one of the expressions based on the condition and evaluate that;
> kind of lazy indexing.

Hm. I quite like this. The new symbol is a visual clue that something's
going on (rather than re-using 'if', which I dislike strongly).

> We could then also have one for ints rather than bools:
> 
>         i -> [ v_0, v_1, v_2, ... ]
> which would pick v_i and evaluate that.

On the other hand, I don't like this. If you need to do something like 
this, why not just

          [ v_0, v_1, v_2, ... ][i]  ?


-- 
Anthony Baxter     <anthony at interlink.com.au>   
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.