PEP308: Yet another syntax proposal

[Paul Rubin]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> >Y'know, when I finished my first Python script, I sent it to my tutor and
> >asked: "So what's the Secret Master Pythonista way of doing this?" His
> >response is etched in my mind: "Python isn't about taking 10 lines of
> >perfectly clear code and collapsing it down into 1 line of obscure code.
> >That's Perl..."
> 
> That, in a nutshell, is what this argument is about.  The problem
> is, there's a natural tension for expert programmers to want to
> express themselves easily and tersely, ...  Python has so far done
> an excellent job of maintaining a balance between all the different
> tensions; those who are unutterably opposed to any form of
> conditional expression fall completely into your camp.

I don't see it that way.  I see a camp that wants a clear, definite,
explicit way to express a conditional expression, and a camp that
prefers "Secret Master Pythonista" bizarre idioms like "x and y or z,
with rework required if it turns out that y can be None or 0 or the
empty list".  From my view, conditional expressions are in the
simplicity camp and "x and y or z" is from the Secret Master Pythonista
 camp.