something like "if" that returns a value?

[holger krekel]

Paul Rudin wrote:
> >>>>> "holger" == holger krekel <pyth at devel.trillke.net> writes:
> 
> 
>  holger> if you are doing this often of course you could write a
>  holger> helper...  but
> 
> But what kind of helper? Writing a function doesn't get round the
> unnecessary evaluation problem. (Arguably it also doesn't entirely help
> with the obfuscation problem either.)

yip, you are basically right although there are some tricks.

>  >> Personally I'd prefer to be able to write something like:
>  >> 
>  >> def foo(x,y,....): return func1(x,y,..) + if some_test:
>  >> func2(x,y...)  else: func3(x,y..)
> 
>  holger> def foo(*args): return func1(*args) + (func2,func3)[not
>  holger> some_test](*args)
> 
> Yah - I didn't mean to imply that the arity and order of the arguments
> was necessarily always the same.

It appeared to me that 'some_test' was a switch for dispatching
to either of two functions taking the same arguments.  

btw, if you have a series of tests and even more functions then 
python syntax and idioms scale quite well (IMO, of course).

I am sure that the more concrete your code snippet is the better 
i can come up with a concise syntactic/semantic minimalization.

but it's of course ok, too, to stop if you've had enough :-)

cheers,

    holger