On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 at 10:37, Dom Grigonis <dom.grigo...@gmail.com> wrote: > As opposed to > > if a == 0: > foo, bar = var1, variable2 > else: > foo, bar = default, default2 > > > Again, one is `a == 0`, another is `b == 0`. I didn’t do a good job conveying > this did I… Will try to be more precise and leave less room for > misinterpretation.
Would you really go through and change all your variable names if it turns out that what you actually need is "a == 0" and "b == 15"? This sort of alignment is so fragile and unnecessary. Yes, it's nice when it works out, but it should never be a high priority. > foo = foo3 if foo2 == 0 else default > bar = barbarbar if bar2 == 0 else default2 > > # As opposed to > > foo = foo2 == 0 ? foo3 : default > bar = bar2 == 0 ? barbarbar : default2 Extremely artificial. You've shown that, if the conditions are the same lengths but the "if-true" expressions aren't, you can align them using ?: and can't align them using if-else. It's just as valid to show: foo = "yes" if foo2 else "no" bar = "yes" if barbarbar else "no" Like I said, extremely fragile. > I don’t think it is that easy to draw the line here. > Everything in both of those PEPs can be expressed using current constructs. > So maybe they are about more compact expressions? "Can be expressed"? Well, yes. Python is Turing-complete. So is Brainf*. Doesn't mean we want to use it though. Expressiveness is a spectrum or a scale. You can improve on it without the older version being impossible to write. In fact, Python really doesn't NEED all the syntax it has. Have a read of this series of blog posts: https://snarky.ca/tag/syntactic-sugar/ (Brett Cannon also did a talk on this at PyCon US 2023; not sure if that's been made public yet.) There are only a handful of pieces of syntax that you really can't do without. But you CAN skip having an "if" statement. No kidding - you can eliminate the if statement by smart use of the while statement. https://snarky.ca/unravelling-if-statements/ Improvements to expressiveness allow us to write better code, to make it clearer what the *programmer's intent* is. Sometimes that aligns with compactness; sometimes it doesn't. > Was python made for conciseness or expressiveness? Everything it does can > already be done in C isn’t it? So I would argue any abstraction is really > more about conciseness. Expressiveness is more about incorporation of what is > already there, but not in the abstraction, i.e. extension. But python being > interpreted language written in another language, I really FAIL to see how is > all of this NOT about conciseness and modularity? > Expressiveness. It's about how well the source code represents the programmer's intent. You could write all of your code as a massive matrix of logic gates, but that wouldn't improve readability. And since you can implement logic gates with water - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxXaizglscw for proof - your program source code could be an acrylic sheet with a bunch of buckets glued onto it. But none of us want to write code like that, and definitely none of us want to read code like that. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/B5YRPPGSGQTAMM6WOKGULK2SKVR4H7KT/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
