Python handles globals badly.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 05:28 pm, Antoon Pardon wrote:

> Should C have chosen '<-' as token for assignment, that error
> would have been far less common.
> 
> The error is also facilitated because C doesn't have booleans
> and so everything can be used as one. If C would have had
> proper booleans 
[...]


In other words, "If C were some other language, then assignment as an
expression would be fine."

I believe I already acknowledged that assignment-as-expression was fine if
it avoided the = versus == error, from the perspective of avoiding errors.
But from the perspective of a clean and logical programming model, perhaps
not so much. Assignment is imperative, not functional, and requiring it to
return a result is somewhat unclean.

Look at it this way: suppose you had a robot servant that always, without
fail or misunderstanding, did what you instructed. There are broadly two
sorts of things that you can give as instructions: questions, and commands.
Questions always require an answer: "What's the length of this list?" is
functional. Commands are imperative, not functional, and don't necessarily
require an answer: "Move the small red pyramid onto the large green cube."
Some commands arguable might require an answer, but arguable they are
better served by an out-of-band error condition (an exception). *Requiring*
all commands to give an answer is silly, given that the robot servant is
infallible.

There's an argument to be made that, clean or not, assignment as an
expression is useful. So be it -- other languages do that. I personally
find it more confusing and annoying than useful when I come across it, but
YMMV.



-- 
Steven