On Nov 17, 7:28 am, Jonathan Saxton <jsax...@appsecinc.com> wrote: > On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:27:31 +0100, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: > >> Congratulations, you just reinvented one of the most infamous source of > >> bugs in C, C++, Java, PHP, javascript and quite a few other languages. > >> Believe it or not, but not allowing this in Python was a very deliberate > >> design choice. > > > Oh, but those hundreds of thousands of man-hours lost to bugs caused by > > assignment-as-an-expression is nothing compared to the dozens of man- > > minutes saved by having one fewer line of code! > > > *wink* > > And if I ever find the genius who had the brilliant idea of using = to mean > assignment then I have a particularly nasty dungeon reserved just for him. > Also a foul-smelling leech-infested swamp for those language designers and > compiler writers who followed his example. (Come to think of it, > plagiarizing a bad idea is probably the worse evil.)
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using = for assignment. The problem in C was allowing an assignment within a conditional expression. Now *that* was a bonehead idea! (Hingsight is 20/20, of course.) Python does not allow that, so there is no problem. Nor do most other languages allow it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list