(a==b) ? 'Yes' : 'No'

[Robert Fendt]

And thus spake John Bokma <john at castleamber.com>
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:19:19 -0600:

> And
> 
>  a == b and 'Yes' or 'No' 
> 
> isn't a Perl-ism?

I never said that this would be better. I don't even get the
point of what the advantage is supposed to be of inverting the
order of the return statement and the conditional check what
should actually _be_ returned. What's wrong with just writing

if a==b:
  return 'Yes'
else:
  return 'No'

apart from it being a few more line breaks and an additional
return statement? The inverted form is not more readable per
se (in fact, quite the opposite), and I would even suggest to
minimise its use even in languages like C++ and Java. The Python
syntax is even worse since it not only inverts the order of
return statement and conditional check, but it also puts the
conditional between the two results.

I find such a convoluted construct especially ugly in a language
which I previously regarded as having a rather striking beauty
of syntactical simplicity. The construct is superfluous,
illogical, unelegant, and thus very un-pythonesque, IMHO. But of
course that's just my $0.02.

> Sheesh, this group would be so much nicer without the constant dragging
> in of Perl to make a point. On top of that, do {  } unless blocks are
> not idomatic in Perl. Perl Best Practices even clearly states to *never*
> use unless.

Sorry, but you have just underlined my point, in fact. If it's
discouraged by experts, then of course the question must be
valid why such a feature even exists (okay, apart from 'it
seemed like a good idea at the time'). And more importantly (and
more on-topic here), why we have to have an analogon in Python.

Regards,
Robert