[Info] PEP 308 accepted - new conditional expressions

[Dave Hansen]

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 01:06:30 -0400, "George Sakkis"
<gsakkis at rutgers.edu> wrote:

>"Dave Hansen" <iddw at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:42:34 -0500, Terry Hancock
>> <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Sunday 09 October 2005 07:50 am, phil hunt wrote:
>> >> On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 01:05:12 -0500, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
>> >> >GvR's syntax has the advantage of making grammatical sense in English (i.e.
>> >> >reading it as written pretty much makes sense).
>> >>
>> >> I know, let's re-write Python to make it more like COBOL! That's
>> >> bound to be a winner!
>> >
>> >Whereas the "natural order" of "condition affirmative negative" is natural
>> >for what reason?  That it is so in C?
>>
>> And Basic, and Fortran, and Lisp, and just about any programming
>> language you care to name, including python (if Condition: Affirmative
>> else: Negative).
>
>Block delimiters (curly braces, if/fi, begin/end, etc.) are also in just about any language but this
>didn't stop python using indentation instead, so what's your point ? Conformity and backwards

The point is order of execution.  The condition is tested first, so it
should appear first.  I can think of no other language besides Perl
where that is not the case.  Admittedly, I don't know every other, or
even a large number, of other languages.

>compatibility should not be top priorities in language design; fortunately for python, they're not.

Conformity I'd agree with, backwards capatibility I strongly disagree.
Breaking existing programs is a Bad Thing(tm).  All the code I wrote
for Python 1.52 still seems to work in 2.4.

Regards,

                               -=Dave
-- 
Change is inevitable, progress is not.