RFC: Assignment as expression (pre-PEP)

[Delaney, Timothy (Tim)]

Alex Martelli wrote:

>> As others have mentioned, your particular instance is probably
>> evidence that you need to restructure your code a little bit, but I
>> do agree that "x = y; if x: ..." is a common enough idiom that it
>> warrants a shortcut. And reusing "as", I think, is nice and readable,
>> and it's an advantage that it doesn't require adding any new keywords
>> or symbols.
> 
> Actually, I agree with you.  Unfortunately, I doubt python-dev will,
> but the chance is good enough that it's probably worth proposing there
> (ideally together with a patch to implement it, just to avoid any
> [otherwise likely] whines about this being difficult to implement:-).

This was proposed on python-dev (or maybe it was python-ideas) - I think
the discussion died out though without any resolution.

You should check the archives to see if there was a resolution on it,
and if not I'd suggest putting a PEP together, rather than just raising
it again.

Tim Delaney