David Baelde wrote: > Statements are not expressions. > > I feel there are some real problems here. But I can't find anything > absolutely unsolvable.
There's no doubt that these problems could be solved in a technical sense, but the real issue is whether the resulting code would be *readable*. One of Python's major strengths is that its code is usually very easy to read, even if it means being a bit more verbose at times than strictly necessary. All the proposals I've seen for statements-in-expressions in Python (and there have been quite a few) have been a disaster in the readability department > PEP #308 was about having a ternary (?:) > operator for expression level conditional, pythonists rejected it. Actually, it was really Guido who rejected it, because Pythonistas failed to reach a consensus on syntax, and he wasn't really hot on the idea in the first place. If he had really wanted it, he would have just picked a syntax himself. > More generally, I think there is no abstract distinction between > statements and expressions. Everything is an expression, can be evaluated > to a value. That's true in a functional language, but Python is not a functional language. In imperative programming, often you just do something for its side effect, and there's no obvious value to return. Forcing everything to return a value just for the sake of conceptual purity is an artificiality, in my view. -- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
