Python complaints

[Gareth McCaughan]

James Logajan wrote:

[I said:]
>> That has the wrong semantics in the presence of side effects.
>> (It's fine for my toy example, but then so is "score<>1 and 's' or ''".
> 
> Fair enough. Your requirements weren't just "kind of like C's '?:'
> operator," they were precisely that requirement. I'm wondering though what
> great application remains unwritten because you are forced to use a
> conditional statement rather than use an operator?

None. Someone asked "what annoys you about Python". The
absence of such an operator (which, incidentally, I prefer
to think of as "like Lisp's IF", not "like C's ?:") is
something that causes me some annoyance every time I
write a non-trivial Python program.

It seems that you think I'm saying "Python is no good
because it doesn't have this". If I thought Python was
no good then I wouldn't use it and I wouldn't be reading
comp.lang.python .

And I said nothing about "requirements". It's just that
the ability to put conditionals in expressions without
ugly hacks is nice, and Python lacks it.

-- 
Gareth McCaughan  Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com
sig under construction