Jussi Piitulainen <jussi.piitulai...@helsinki.fi> writes: > BartC writes: > >> On 17/08/2016 07:39, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >>> Rather than ask why Python uses `trueval if cond else falseval`, you >>> should ask why C uses `cond ? trueval : falseval`. Is that documented >>> anywhere? >> >> I'm not fond of C's a ? b : c but the principle is sound. I generally > > [- -] > >> Anyway a?b:c was existing practice. At least the order of a,b,c could >> have been retained if not the exact syntax. > > The original was (c1 -> e1, c2 -> e2, ..., cn -> en) in John McCarthy's > 1960 paper on symbolic expressions, with an actual arrow glyph in place > of hyphen-greater-than.
And BCPL (Martin Richards 1967) took the same arrow and comma syntax. BCPL spawned B which led to C, but in B Thompson used ? and : but kept the right-to-left binding. I think the change was unfortunate because the arrow works well in various layouts and looks much better when chained (though that might just be my bias from being a BCPL coder from way back). <snip> -- Ben. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
