PEP 308: Obfuscated Nested Ternaries (Not)

[David Eppstein]

In article <MvudncQKAr1OasmjXTWcrg at comcast.com>,
 "Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

> Instead, I will rewrite so more clear than original.
> 
> seq = (
>     x > 0 ?
>         y > 0 ? (tl, br, b, br, r, br) :
>         y==0 ? (l, r, t, r, b, r) :
>                     (bl, tr, t, tr, r, tr) :
>     x==0 ?
>         y > 0 ? (t, b, l, b, r, b) :
>         y==0 ? (tl, tr, br, bl, tl) :
>                     (b, t, l, t, r, t) :
>     # x < 0
>         y > 0 ? (tr, bl, b, bl, l, bl) :
>         y==0 ? (r, l, t, l, b, l) :
>                     (br, tl, t, tl, l, tl)
>         )

This goes completely against the Python philosophy that whitespace 
should be used to define the structure.  It would be very easy to 
reindent this to make it look like it did something other than what it 
really did.  For this reason I prefer using if-elif-else statements to 
ternary expressions for anything this big.

-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/