On 09/10/2015 01:27 AM, Antoon Pardon wrote: > Op 09-09-15 om 19:55 schreef Steven D'Aprano: >> In fairness to the C creators, I'm sure that nobody back in the early >> seventies imagined that malware and security vulnerabilities would be as >> widespread as they have become. But still, the fundamental decisions made >> by C are lousy. Assignment is an expression? > > What is wrong with that?
Makes for a common error of putting an assignment in a conditional expression like: if (a=4) this_is_always_true(); GCC will give you a warning over that these days. But many C programmers still adopt a notation of if (4 == a) do_something(); to protect them if they accidentally leave out one =. If assignment was not an expression, then the compiler would properly error out every time you used a solitary = in the conditional of an if statement. Python strikes a good compromise. You can chain = in an assignment statement, but you can't use them in a conditional expression. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
