Can I use a conditional in a variable declaration?

[Sion Arrowsmith]

Ron Adam  <rrr at ronadam.com> wrote:
>volcs0 at gmail.com wrote:
>> I want the equivalent of this:
>> 
>> if a == "yes":
>>    answer = "go ahead"
>> else:
>>    answer = "stop"
>> 
>> in [a] more compact form:
>I sometimes find it useful to do:
>
>     answers = {True: "go ahead", False: "stop"}
>     answer = answers[a == "yes"]

In this particular case, you can get it even more compact as

answer = {"yes": "go ahead"}.get(a, "stop")

but that's sacrificing elegance and readability for bytes. When I find
myself with code like the OP's, I usually rewrite as:

answer = "stop"
if a == "yes":
    answer = "go ahead"

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