Proposal for new minor syntax

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 28 Mar 2015 07:48 am, Ian Kelly wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Jamie Willis
> <jw14896.2014 at my.bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
>> I would like to propose a new piece of syntax for the python language; .=
>>
>> In short, the operator is form of syntactic sugar, for instance consider
>> the following code:
>>
>> hello = "hello world              "
>> hello = hello.strip()
>>
>> This could be written as:
>>
>> hello = "hello world              "
>> hello .= strip()
>>
>> In this slightly contrived example, the programmer saved (a small amount
>> of) time when writing the code. With code with longer variable names, or
>> lots of similar statements all in a row, this helps to keep code more
>> concise.
>>
>> The operator would be constricted to one method or field on the
>> right-hand side, which must belong to the object on the left hand side.
> 
> Do you mean that this would not be legal?
> 
> hello .= strip().upper().encode('utf-8')
> 
> Is there a reason you want to disallow that?
> 
>> Another example could be when using Linked Lists, instead of writing
>> something like:
>>
>> loop_node = loop_node.next
>>
>> you could write:
>>
>> loop_node .= next
> 
> I realize this is just an example, but does anybody actually use
> linked lists in Python outside of class assignments? It seems hard to
> justify performance-wise since list is written in C, and if you need
> to beat it, then you probably shouldn't be doing so in Python.


https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/python-cookbook/0596001673/ch14s05.html


-- 
Steven