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

[jerf at compy.attbi.com]

On Sat, 08 Feb 2003 15:49:22 +0000, Dale Strickland-Clark wrote:
> I really don't have much sympathy for that argument. If you want to
> understand a language, you will need to know it.

Go look at perl, and look at some Perl code, and then look at some *other*
perl code by a different author.

If you still don't understand the statement, then I guess our opinions
differ and that's fine. 

I know that what he's talking about is true, though, because I deal with
it every day. I'm working on a code base with four or five other Perl
programmers, and I can tell, with absolute certainty, exactly who wrote
what part, because the *coding styles* are that much different. (Not 
comment styles, not control flow styles, actual line-for-line code.) Only
one guy uses the implicit assignment of pieces of a regex match to $1, $2,
$3, etc., for instance, to name one thing that drives me nuts every time I
see it. (Because you can't go searching for where $1 was assigned, and it
can propogate a surprising distance from the original regex if code is
carefully written... oh, and there's no good way to search for "the last
regex" either, unless you're lucky enough for the previous programmer to
always stick to the / delimiter, which fortunately is another marker of
that programmer.)