> I very much appreciate Guido putting forward a PEP on if > expressions, but I must say the idea of letting c.l.p 'vote' on it > is unwelcome. Voting only makes sense when an electorate is educated > enough to properly understand the proposition and its consequences; > the discussion so far makes clear that that isn't true. Programming > languages need to be designed, not agglutinated. (Otherwise you get > Perl and Fortran 2000 (:->) Part of my "cunning plan" is to show that indeed this doesn't work. I'm hoping you will forgive me this once-only Macchiavellian move. :-) > I think it is fair to say that being the head designer of a language > can lead to frustration at times; I had to endure it on a much > smaller scale and it was very hard to keep patiently explaining how > the features had to fit together, and how they had to be both > parseable and implementable and learnable, and that not every little > difficulty is worth a language feature. I admit I've lost some of my patience. Showing that there is immense resistance to if-then-else expressions (even if there is also a lot of pressure to add them) would make it easier in the future to explain why they aren't there. Or vice versa. > In the cases of several of the features adopted recently, a quick > inspection has initially led me to believe that the feature was not > interesting but study showed that it was. I just don't think you can > delegate this kind of study to a group that is mostly inexperienced > even at programming much less language design. > > I want my BDFL. As Davy Crockett said, "Be sure you're right, then > go ahead." But in this case, I can't made up my mind! And as long as I haven't made up my mind, I won't add it. Hmm... Well, I think right now I don't need if-then-else expressions enough to want them. I just examined a fairly large (> 1300 lines) module that I recently spent a lot of time with, looking for places where I could use it. I found a dozen places where there was an if-else construct with similar one-line then and else branches that could easily be rewritten as a single line using an if-then-else expression. But I'm not at all convinced that the resulting code is any more understandable (even though it's shorter by three dozen lines). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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