Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Thu, 02 Jan 2014 17:20:54 +0000, John Allsup <py...@allsup.co>
> declaimed the following:
>>In many languages, such as C, one can use assignments in conditionals
>>and expressions. The most common, and useful case turns up when you
>
> Really? You can't do it in FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, Ada...
>
> C, C++, Java, C# are all based on the same core syntax. For all
> effective purposes, they are the same as grouping M$ Visual BASIC,
> GW-BASIC, Kemeny&Kurtz TrueBASIC as "most languages, such as BASIC"...
Thank you for pointing this out! Far too many people imagine that C and the
C-inspired languages make up the entire universe of programming.
But having said that, features should be judged on their merit, not on
whether they are familiar to Ada/Lisp/C/Algol/... programmers. (Although
familiarity is one factor out of many which should be considered.)
Personally, I find it hard to care about assignment as an expression. I find
the obvious C-inspired syntax terrible, as it is too easy to mistakenly use
== instead of = or visa versa:
if m = re.match(pattern, text):
...
Using "as" is slightly better:
if re.match(pattern, text) as m:
...
but I don't think it's sufficiently useful for me to get excited about it.
However, I don't think we should treat this as specific to if statements:
for i, obj in enumerate(alist + blist + clist as items):
items[i] = process(obj)
Is that really better than this?
items = alist + blist + clist
for i, obj in enumerate(items):
items[i] = process(obj)
--
Steven
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
