[Python-Dev] Adding C ternary select (a?b:c) to Python?

[Jim Fulton]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> Dear developers,
> 
> Eric Raymond has sent me the following patch, which adds conditional
> expressions to Python.  I'd like to hear opinions on whether this is a
> good thing to add to Python, and whether this is the right syntax.

Yee ha! I think that this is a great idea. 

I'm surprised that using the colon doesn't cause problems.
I'm not a grammer lawyer, and don't care that much. I very 
much would like to see a conditional expression. I wouldn't
object if it was spelled differently than C's.

> I am a bit skeptical about whether this is sufficiently Pythonic, but
> on the other hand there have always been requests for such a feature,
> and the existing solutions are ugly:
> 
>   a and b or c
> 
> only works when you know for sure that b will never be false, and
> 
>   (a and [b] or [c])[0]
> 
> is dead ugly...

Yup.

   (a and (b,) or (c,))[0]

is even worse. ;)

Jim

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