conditional expressions (RE: Loop-and-a-half (Re: Curious assignment behaviour))

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:
...
| I don't know what it takes to reconstitute your faith in Python 2.2.
| There's one little point of light: conditional expressions are out.  I
| couldn't find any examples in the standard library that would be made
| to look better by using them. :-)
|
| Regarding all the other changes (you're right, I won't back them out
| :-), I believe that they are much more backwards compatible than you
| fear.  Integer division won't become the default until 3.0, for
| example.  Same thing for new-style classes: I'm committed to make
| applications that use Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass or otherwise use the
| Don Beaudry hook work the same way as they did in 1.5.2 and 2.1.1, and
| I've pretty much achieved this in 2.2a4 already.  New-style classes
| will be dynamic by default in 2.2b1 and their instances will allow
| assignment to self.__class__.
|
| What else?  2.2 has lots of improvements that you'll want and that
| don't affect the language syntax at all -- better portability, better
| and automatically configured large file support, etc.

Well, you know I'm a pretty hard sell on features.  The way I see
it, Python has all the features I need, has had them all along -
if only I could use it.  But too often I can't and have to write
in C instead, or awk or something if I'm lucky.

That happens mainly because of "market penetration", so to speak.
What can be done about that?  I don't think it's something for you
to solve, you need to move forward with whatever you think will
make Python better.  When it comes to that, I guess I'm more of a
minimalist, but in the end you're the one to say what's right.
But getting it out into the world and installed, getting one's
colleagues to learn it, I don't know if that really hangs on new
features or is hung by them.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu