For review: PEP 308 - If-then-else expression

[Erik Max Francis]

Alan Daniels wrote:

> On Sun, 09 Feb 2003 16:26:06 -0800, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > The combination of the punctuation and a keyword still gives me an
> > eek.
> 
> Actually, we have combinations of punctuation and keyword already,
> because every "if" and "else" has to be followed by a colon character.

I was really referring to punctuation other than colons, which are
ubiquitous in Python code.  I thought that was kind of implied.

> I agree that a ternary operator would be useful, and most people here
> seem to want one, as long as it's "Pythonic", that is, easy to
> understand at first glance, easy to read later on, and not prone to
> abuse over time.
> 
> I'm proposing the...
> 
>   cond ? x else y
> 
> ...syntax because I haven't really seen any more legible alternative.

My moderate objection to it is that the ? helps people familiar with
conditional operators in other langages but isn't really a panacea for
someone coming across it for the first time (the ? doesn't really tell
me what's going on).  I personally just have an objection to a ternary
operator (conditional or not) where one element is punctuation and the
other is a keyword, it seems ugly to me.  (In this case, it's merely an
attempt to keep as close to the ?: notation used in other languages,
which in and of itself doesn't really impress me.)

> (P.S. I still don't see what's wrong with good ol' "cond ? x : y")

Because Guido said so in the PEP.  It's his language.

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