Voting for PEP 308 (was Re: For review: PEP 308 - If-then-else expression)

[Delaney, Timothy C (Timothy)]

> From: Laura Creighton [mailto:lac at strakt.com]
> 
> Most of the people who don't care will also not be posting.  Or
> voting. They're probably not reading comp.lang.python, either.  I
> remember when 2.0 came out and people found out about string methods.
> A whole bunch of them came back to post articles about how they
> thought the new join syntax was really awful and ugly.  They only
> cared after it got in, but enough to complain a lot.

Actually, some of us were posting about how we thought the new join syntax was really awful and ugly (and unintuitive) well before 2.0 came out.

Some of us still are <0.1 wink> and still use string.join(seq, sep) and will fight vigorously to prevent it being removed, even though it's deprecated.

We were unfortunately unsuccessful in convincing people that some things are better as a function accepting multiple arguments than as a method of one of those two arguments.

As to PEP 308, I haven't involved myself in the arguments because:

1. I think anything I said would be lost in the noise;

2. I highly doubt that I will change anyone's mind;

3. I'm -0 on having a ternary operator at all (and will vote that way);

4. I think all the alternatives proposed so far are awful and ugly, but anything which is not of the form

    <test> <true result> <false result>

is complete lunacy;

5. Guido appears to be becoming anti-<true result> <test> <false result> because it is out of order, so I'm not too worried that I will have to cope with it in other people's code.

Tim Delaney