PEP-308 a "simplicity-first" alternative

[Peter Hansen]

holger krekel wrote:
> 
> Peter Hansen wrote:
> > Any time someone writes "it's nice" or "it's a neat trick" in
> > a discussion of this nature, I'd like to run screaming from
> > the room...  we _eschew_ neat tricks, not embrace them!
> 
> Sorry, peter, but this sounds rather formal.  Do you really think
> it's that great a "feature" that you have to switch to another idiom
> if your ternary becomes binary? 

I would argue that a ternary operator should not be able to be
a binary operator with the else case left out.  I'm in the camp
that not only believes the "explicit is better than implicit"
and which thinks a ternary operator with an element missing is
just too implicit to be comfortable.

Comparisons with the conventional if:/else: don't work.  In
the conventional case, where you are saying "if A then DO X,
otherwise DO Z", if Z is "pass" you clearly don't need to 
specify it.  In the expression case, the else case would be
"None" which is not just the absence of a result but actually
a specific, special result which has special meaning in Python.
It should be explicit if this is what gets returned when you
"don't care" about the else case... I believe.

We can agree to disagree, but I'm pretty firm on this point and
don't believe you can dissuade me.  On the other hand, if your
preference makes it in, I probably won't be overly concerned 
either, although I doubt I'd ever use it and I would probably
find it surprising each time I read it.

-Peter