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

[Ben Bacarisse]

Jussi Piitulainen <jussi.piitulainen at helsinki.fi> writes:

> 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.

And BCPL (Martin Richards 1967) took the same arrow and comma syntax.
BCPL spawned B which led to C, but in B Thompson used ? and : but kept
the right-to-left binding.  I think the change was unfortunate because
the arrow works well in various layouts and looks much better when
chained (though that might just be my bias from being a BCPL coder from
way back).

<snip>
-- 
Ben.