On 2020-08-07 at 21:54:35 +0200, Marco Sulla <marco.sulla.pyt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 at 19:48, Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org> wrote: > Christian Seberino just expressed a doubt about how a clear separation > between a statement and an expression is quite desiderable in the > "real" programming world. And I tried to explain it with the > assignment operation, since a ton of programmers feel very frustrated > about reading code of other programmers with assignment in an if > statement. I'm quite sure that they thought, as I thought: "What do > this?" > Worse when their program failed and they discovered that they wrote > `if (a=b)` instead of `if (a==b)`. Don't conflate the concept with the syntax. The fact that Python now has "the walrus operator" says that assignment expressions are useful. The issue with the C version is that the assignment and comparison operators look too much alike and using the wrong one can cause *silent* catastrophes (although modern C compilers can and do emit appropriate warnings or errors, if you ask them nicely). > I'm just more curious about why Lisp programmers think that it's > better to not make a hard distinction between statements and > expressions. Simplicity of syntax. Very few languages have a simpler syntax than Lisp (Ook, et al, notwithstanding). -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
