On 2010-03-30 13:16:00 -0700, Robert Fendt said:
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.
In Python before list-comprehensions, I might have agreed with you.
Initially, I was quite resistant to list comprehensions as well. They
seemed ugly, and backwards, and why not just write a for loop?
Then I got used to them, and I find they are very elegant when used
properly. Sometimes you can do something ugly with them, but its
actually quite possible to write positively hideous Python even without
any of these new fancy shmancy features.
But, in the post-comprehension world, where one can do:
my_odds = [x for x in range(100) if x % 2 == 1]
Things have changed. I've now grown used to reading expressions like
that which seem a bit backwards, with the value being returned by an
expression is the left-most element. Its not an exact correlation
because they're answering different problems.
But having gotten used to list comprehensions, and actually quite
appreciating their elegance now, I find this reads very well:
is_odd = "odd" if x % 2 == 1 else "even"
In fact, it reads better then any of the other conditional expression
syntaxes people proposed back in the day, and a LOT better then what
was done before:
is_odd = x % 2 == 1 and "odd" or "even"
Even if the above falls a bit more in line with what other languages
usually do order-wise, this isn't other languages.
Now, none of this addresses your original argument of why not just use
a regular if statement.
I dunno, I often used "and/or" for simple expressions or defaults and
found it very convienent and made code more readable then the line and
whitespace inducing true if-statement. And so I'm glad to have
something even more readable and without the bug-prone and/or error.
Why not just use a for loop anytime you use a list comprehension? :)
Same question really applies.
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