"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <da...@vex.net>: > On Wed, 17 Aug 2016 16:39:30 +1000 > Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> cond ? trueval : falseval >> >> Because the C syntax is horrifically ugly, whereas the Python syntax >> is very close to real English syntax. > > Or, put another way, Python prefers English over line noise.
It can also be confusing. I recently introduced programming to someone using Python. Because of its similarity with English, they thought Python understood stuff like: if x or y == 0: ... for: if x == 0 or y == 0: ... or: if (x, y) is self.on_point(): ... for: if self.on_point(x, y): ... Somewhat analogously, I remember how confusing it was to learn formal logic in college. I was having a hard time getting the point of definitions like: (x ∧ y) is true iff x is true and y is true That's because I had learned in highschool that "x ∧ y" was just an abbreviation of "x and y". Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list