if <assignment>:

[Erik Max Francis]

André Næss wrote:

> if myvar = someFunction():
> 
> My question is, what is the rationale for this? Is it a technical
> issue? Or
> purely a matter of language design? I'm curious because I'm interested
> in
> the design og programming languages, not because I want this behavior
> changed in Pyton :)

It's a language design feature, intended to avoid the confusion between
when people write (say, in C):

	if (a = b) ...

but mean

	if (a == b) ...

Instead in Python assignments are treated as statements, not
expressions, so they cannot appear in an if clause.

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