On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 1:15 PM, Mike Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > If anyone is interested I came across this same subject on a blog post and > discussion on HN today: > > - https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/ > - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16803874
Those people who say "x = x + 1" makes no sense... do they also get confused by the fact that you can multiply a string by a number? Programming is not algebra. The ONLY reason that "x = x + 1" can fail to make sense is if you start by assuming that there is no such thing as time. That's the case in algebra, but it simply isn't true in software. Functional programming languages are closer to algebra than imperative languages are, but that doesn't mean they _are_ algebraic, and they go to great lengths to lie about how you can have side-effect-free side effects and such. Fortunately, Python is not bound by such silly rules, and can do things because they are useful for real-world work. Thus the question of ":=" vs "=" vs "==" vs "===" comes down to what is actually worth doing, not what would look tidiest to someone who is trying to represent a mathematician's blackboard in ASCII. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
