On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 04:59 am, random...@fastmail.us wrote: > On Wed, Sep 9, 2015, at 13:55, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> 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? > > Whoa, hold on. The problem with C assignment isn't that it's an > expression, it's that it's spelled "=" and can be used in contexts where > one would normally do an equality comparison.
Yes, that's what I'm referring to. Although, I'm not sure that I agree with the idea that "everything is an expression". I think that's a category mistake, like asking for the speed of dark[1], or for a bucket of cold. Some things are functional by nature, and other things are imperative; some may be both, but I don't think that assignment is one. I think that assignment is imperative, not functional, and forcing it to return a value is artificial. > In some languages (Lisp/Scheme/etc come to mind), *everything* is an > expression. But assignment is spelled with, generally, some variant of > "set" [setq, set!, etc]. Yes, that at least avoids the possibility of mistaking = for == or similar. [1] Obviously it's faster than light, since wherever the light arrives, it finds the dark got there first. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
