One of the big problems with most of the proposed spellings is that
question marks to a learner will feel like truthiness tests and not None
tests. I would propose adding a new default statement for the most useful
part of this PEP, the ?= assignment
currently:
if x is None:
x = blah
with `?=`:
x ?= blah
with defalult:
default x: blah
This a) makes it obvious even to an amateur python-reader that x will only
be changed if it does not yet exist, and b) has no similarity to the
truthiness checks involved with the standard meaning of `?` as the ternary
operator in many other languages.
On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 8:30 AM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:24 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 20 July 2018 at 13:16, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:14 PM, Rhodri James <rho...@kynesim.co.uk>
> wrote:
> >>> I go with SF fandom's traditional :-) definition: "somebody did it
> once."
> >>> If it's been done more than once, it's an honoured tradition.
> >>
> >> But if Shakespeare did it, it's just the way the language is.
> >>
> >> I think Fortran is the programming world's Shakespeare.
> >
> > Or maybe COBOL:
> >
> > "And lo from yonder file a record doth appear"...
>
> Hah! But I was thinking of all those uber-obvious features like "a +
> b" meaning addition. Those symbols, and the infix style, aren't
> "traditions" - they're the baseline that we measure everything else
> against. Also, the use of decimal digits to represent literals; if you
> *don't* use decimal, you're unusual. (Which makes the Shakespeare
> Programming Language [1] an ironic example, since it doesn't use
> decimal digits for numeric literals.)
>
> ChrisA
> [1] http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/
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