On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 07:06:35PM -0400, David Mertz wrote: > And yes, the problem is that the equivalent is actually: > > v = a > if v is not None: v=a.b > > The semantics are simply not the ones that are intuitive to most people > reading 'v = a?.b'
Tell us more about these "intuitive to most people" semantics. What are they? Did you do a survey? How many people did you ask? Did you do a comparison to the "intuitive to most people" semantics of slicing syntax? Intuitive does not mean "familiar". If you're going to dismiss a proposal because it's not "intuitive"[1] then to avoid accusations of intellectual hypocracy you need to do one of two things: - demonstrate that the syntactic features we know and love and use frequently (e.g. slicing, decorators, comprehensions) are intuitively obvious and don't need to be learned; - or say that *those features were terrible errors* that Python still has not recovered from. You can't have it both ways: its okay that people have to learn slicing, decorators, comprehensions, never mind that they aren't intuitive, for *those* features "intuitiveness" isn't that important; but for this proposal, "intuitiveness" is all the matters: usefulness, conciseness and the increase in expressivity don't matter one whit. Its one thing to say that slicing, dot attribute access, decorators, augmented assignment, comprehensions etc are mistakes we should not repeat. But this double-standard of demanding higher standards for new features than we accept in existing, beloved features is one that we should reject with extreme prejudice. [1] To whom? Babies? First-time programmers? People with a Ph.D. in comp sci and thirty years experience in half a dozen languages? -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
