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

[Jamie Guinan]

On Fri, 07 Feb 2003 15:16:18 -0500, Andrew Koenig wrote:

> Jamie> Little annoyances like that add up, and make code harder to
> Jamie> read.  I like the fact that Python keeps things simple and Jamie>
> consistent, and I'm perfectly happy to trade the conciseness Jamie>
> offered by this proposed syntax for the clarity of doing it Jamie> "the
> long way",
> 
> Jamie>     if simple-test-expression: Jamie>
> big-long-complicated-expression Jamie>     else: Jamie>         ...
> 
> The trouble is that there are contexts, such as function arguments, in
> which one would like to use this form but it's not allowed.

Ah, of course, an expression returns a value (duh).  I see the motivation
better now.  Still, I can imagine that it would get (ab)used in contexts
where the result was ignored, just as an alternative conditional syntax.


> For example, suppose ints is a list of numbers, and we want to create a
> list of strings each of which represents the value of the corresponding
> number, except that if the number is negative, we would like the string
> to be "?".
> 
> Some people would write something like this:
> 
>         strs = []
>         for i in ints:
>             if i < 0:
>                 strs.append("?")
>             else:
>                 strs.append(str(i))
> 
> but others (including me) would like to be able to write this:
> 
>         strs = [("?" if i < 0 else str(i)) for i in ints]
> 
> I find this example easier to understand than the previous one.

Yes, if you wrote it - but reading the first one takes me less 
time than parsing the second one.

> I think that if you like list comprehensions and lambda expressions,
> you'll probably like PEP 308; if you don't, you probably won't.

I found lambda expressions really handy for tying object methods to
xml.parsers.expat parser functions which don't accept a "this" argument.
I liked them after that. :)

-Jamie