Relax Syntax for Augmented Arithmetic?

[andrew cooke]

On Jan 18, 9:01 am, Chris Rebert <c... at rebertia.com> wrote:
> Indeed. Python happens to in this case draw the line at using the
> augmented assignment operators for non-assignment. I personally see
> this as reasonable because the = symbol has a consistent meaning in
> Python (assignment) whereas the other plain operators, as you bring
> up, consistently have no predetermined meaning;

my argument was that *= is not treated as = and *, but as a completely
new operator (the docs even say that the implementation need not
return self which suggests some pretty extreme semantics were
envisaged).  however, as i've just commented elsewhere, this
commitment to operators was only half-baked because they are parsed as
assignments.

anyway, to reply to your comment - *= is not predetermined.  it is
determined by __imul__ which is user-definable.

> but I do agree that it
> is in a sense an arbitrary restriction, like many programming language
> design choices. However, Python was not explicitly designed for
> creating DSLs,

python is a general programming language.  as far as i can make any
sense at all of your argument it seems to be "you are asking for
change, but this is not how the current system works".  to which the
obvious answer is: if it did work that way i wouldn't be asking for
change.

andrew