I am new to python. I have a few questions coming from an armature!

[MRAB]

On 2016-08-17 18:19, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> MRAB writes:
>
>> On 2016-08-17 12:24, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
>>> BartC writes:
>>>
>>>> On 17/08/2016 07:39, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>>>> Rather than ask why Python uses `trueval if cond else falseval`, you
>>>>> should ask why C uses `cond ? trueval : falseval`. Is that documented
>>>>> anywhere?
>>>>
>>>> I'm not fond of C's a ? b : c but the principle is sound. I generally
>>>
>>> [- -]
>>>
>>>> Anyway a?b:c was existing practice. At least the order of a,b,c could
>>>> have been retained if not the exact syntax.
>>>
>>> The original was (c1 -> e1, c2 -> e2, ..., cn -> en) in John
>>> McCarthy's 1960 paper on symbolic expressions, with an actual arrow
>>> glyph in place of hyphen-greater-than.
>>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> BCPL, the ancestor of  C, had:
>>
>>     a -> b, c
>
> Nice. Add a redundant pair of parentheses and it's the same. (When used
> as an expression, a final else-branch is mandatory-ish.)
>
> But C uses -> for something else, I think. And other languages use it
> for lambda expressions (succesfully, I think, but then they don't have
> it available for this purpose).
>
C uses "->" for dereferencing a pointer to the member of a struct.

If "p" points to a struct (record), then "*p" is that struct, and if 
that struct has a member (field) "m", then that member can be accessed 
by "(*p)->m" (the parens are necessary because of the operator 
precedence). This can be abbreviated to "p->m".

Pascal, on the other hand, dereferences with a postfixed "^", so that 
would be "p^.m".