[Python-ideas] Python Reviewed

[Simon Lovell]

Hi Kyle,

I don't see the harm caused from having a do-while construct. Not the 
most used construct but it is sometimes useful and not having it means 
you need to either have a first time through marker or a break at the 
end of a "while True:" loop.


I would say that None should also be non-boolean. Otherwise you are 
saying that things which might be None would be True if not None.


Re: SQLAlchemy, this does not resolve the issues satisfactorily to me.


Re: half-loop. The idea that you have the same code before entry and at 
the end of the loop is really ugly and raises the potential for errors. 
I can remember doing something similarly ugly with this for looping 
through a cursor but I can't recall why I couldn't just do a .fetchall() 
and then loop through the results. Maybe I ultimately changed it to do 
precisely that. Perhaps you have too big a data set to load into memory 
all at once though and can't do it that way. Anyway, the SQL processing 
is all too difficult in Python and Java and nearly all modern languages.


Re: Conditional expression. You could have: "<result> = if <condition> 
then <true-value> else <false value". Reading the actual syntax I find 
requires more concentration than it should. However, this means another 
keyword*.

* General comment: I posted this because Googling didn't give me a 
satisfactory answer to why Python is the way that it is. I think I see 
it now. Guido hates keywords. I don't find this particularly logical but 
it is what it is and it also isn't going to change. That seems also to 
explain the else keyword at the end of the while loop.


Anyway, I think this discussion has reached its natural conclusion here.