Can I use a conditional in a variable declaration?

[volcs0 at gmail.com]

I've done this in Scheme, but I'm not sure I can in Python.

I want the equivalent of this:

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

in this more compact form:


a = (if a == "yes": "go ahead": "stop")


is there such a form in Python? I tried playing around with lambda
expressions, but I couldn't quite get it to work right.