at wrote: > With the current Python syntax, I can create for every two lines of code a > dozen alternative implementations:
The "one way to do it" rule seems to be widely misquoted and misunderstood. Of course any Turing-complete programming language is going to provide infinitely many ways of expressing anything. What the "one way" rule is saying is that there is no point in the language going out of its way to provide two syntaxes for something with no clear reason to prefer one or the other in any given situation. Like, for instance, Perl having both "if (condition) statement" and "statement if (condition)". That's exactly the sort of thing you're proposing here, and that's why the "one way" rule-of-thumb suggests it's not a good idea. It's not a hard-and-fast rule; one could argue that list comprehensions violate it, and many people did. Ultimately Guido decided that LCs were a big enough win in certain situations, probably because they bring something from the realm of statements into the realm of expressions. Your proposal doesn't do that -- it just rewrites a pair of statements very slightly to give another statement, and opinions differ on whether it would improve or hurt readability. Furthermore, Guido has considered this exact idea before, promoted using the same arguments, and rejected it, so it's unlikely he would change his mind this time around. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
