On Mar 29, 5:55 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I don't know if this is the right place to discuss the death of <> in > Python 3.0, or if there have been any meaningful discussions posted > before (hard to search google with '<>' keyword), but why would anyone > prefer the comparison operator != over <>??? > > I've written an article about it to try and save this nice "is not > equal" operator, located athttp://dewitters.koonsolo.com/python_neq.html > > Please set it straight in 3.0, and if not, convince me with a good > reason of doing so, so that I can live with it and don't have to spend > the rest of my life in 2.x ;).
<quote who=OP's blog> All pretty clear hey? But now comes the catch, there exists an operator !=... but what does it mean? Well, that one is pretty easy, of course ! must be an operator of its own (in non-python languages meaning 'not'), and it resembles the fancy assignment statement <...snip...> When I started to learn python I came across an operator <>. What could it mean? Well, you don't have to think long about it. You're only reference are the < and > operators (with meanings the same as in mathematics or plain written language, any non programmer would understand this). So <> must mean "smaller or larger", or not-equals, no question about that. It couldn't possible be mistaken as an assignment operator. You just have to love a language that uses operators with clear and obvious meaning. </quote> You're forcing your argument too much, both != and <> are NOT standard mathematics operators -- the standard not-equal operator is >< -- and I can assure you that both != and <> won't be comprehensible to non- programmers. And I'm not sure if anyone could have mistaken != for assignment operator because they're used in completely different places (which is the reason why some languages can use the same operator for = (assignment) and == (comparison)). = is always used in a line by itself while != is always used in places where a 'condition' (a.k.a. 'expression') is required. The problem you stated may be a problem in C/C++ (if C/C++ do have both != and <>, fortunately they only have !=) because C/C++'s = (assignment) is an operator and operators always return a value but in Python = (assignment) is a statement and can't return a value so "if a = b:" always raise an error. Since != operator can only be used in places where a 'condition'/'expression' is required and never in a line by itself as a statement, it could never be mistaken as an assignment (which is a statement). The problem just don't exist in Python. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
