Antoon,
You keep beating a dead horse. NOBODY denies there are benefits to suggestions
like the one we are describing. It is a logical fallacy to keep arguing this
way.
And nobody (meaning me) suggests costs are a dominant factor in decisions no
matter the benefits. The realistic suggestion is to not only weight costs and
benefits for one proposal but for all reasonable proposals and then choose.
I have no idea what the actual cost of changing the parser is. It may be
trivial or very nontrivial. I do not know if the actual chosen change, from a
range of possible implementations, will leave the speed of typical programs
untouched or will add lots of overhead for all programs including the ones not
using this feature. Nor do I know how many existing features might clash with
the choice of implementation and need to be changed to resolve them or face
lots of bug reports later.
So what I and others have said here is not based completely on known and
measured facts. But before approving a proposal, some analysis and estimates
must be made including a decision to just cancel any work if it over-runs
targeted costs of various kinds.
Now for a dumb question. Many languages allow a form of setting a variable to a
value like:
assign(var, 5+sin(x))
If we had a function that then returned var or the value of var, cleanly, then
would that allow an end run on the walrus operator?
if (assign(sign, 5+sin(x)) <= assign(cosign, 5+cos(x))) …
Not necessarily pretty and I am sure there may well be reasons it won’t work,
but I wonder if it will work in more places than the currently minimal walrus
operator.
From: Antoon Pardon <antoon.par...@vub.be>
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2021 3:03 AM
To: Avi Gross <avigr...@verizon.net>; python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: New assignmens ...
Op 27/10/2021 om 20:20 schreef Avi Gross:
I think anyone who suggests we should separate costs from benefits belongs
securely within the academic world and should remain there.
Practical things need to be built considering costs. Theoretical things,
sure, cost is not an issue.
Seperating costs from benefits doesn't mean costs are not an issue. It means
you don't deny de benefits because there are costs. Sure in the end the costs
may outweight the benefits but that is still not the same as there being no
benefits at all.
If you want to weight the costs against the benefits you need to acknowledge
both and not start by denying the benefits because you presume they will
not outweight the costs.
--
Antoon.
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