"Greg Ewing" wrote: > > 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.
Well, I guess what makes an artificiality is subjective then, because IMO the distinction between expressions and statements is a bigger artificiality. Python already uses a default value (None) to return from a callable, so what makes statements special ? Certainly not the side effects, as the two equivalent ways to set an attribute show: a.x = val # statement setattr(a,'x',val) # expression George -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
