[Python-Dev] Informal educator feedback on PEP 572 (was Re: 2018 Python Language Summit coverage, last part)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 30 June 2018 at 19:35, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> So I think Q1 is the critical one. And I think the answer is, no,
> they're conceptually bloody simple. They evaluate the expression on the
> right, assign it to the name on the left, and return that value.

And the proposed parent local scoping in PEP 572 has the virtue of
making all of the following do *exactly the same thing*, just as they
would in the version without the assignment expression:

    ref = object()
    container = [item := ref]
    container = [x for x in [item := ref]]
    container = [x for x in [item := ref] for i in range(1)]
    container = list(x for x in [item := ref])
    container = list(x for x in [item := ref] for i in range(1))

    # All variants pass this assertion, keeping the implicit sublocal
scope almost entirely hidden
    assert container == [ref] and item is ref and item is container[0]

My own objections were primarily based on the code-generation-centric
concept of wanting Python's statement level scoping semantics to
continue to be a superset of its expression level semantics, and
Guido's offer to define "__parentlocal" in the PEP as a conventional
shorthand for describing comprehension style assignment expression
scoping when writing out their statement level equivalents as
pseudo-code addresses that. (To put it another way: it turned out it
wasn't really the semantics themselves that bothered me, since they
have a lot of very attractive properties as shown above, it was the
lack of a clear way of referring to those semantics other than "the
way assignment expressions behave in implicit comprehension and
generator expression scopes").

Cheers,
Nick.



-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia