[Python-Dev] Is implicit underscore assignment buggy?

[Guido van Rossum]

This is by design.

The intent is that as long as you call something that returns no
value, your last result is not thrown away. IOW _ is the last result
that wasn't None.

Please don't change this.

--Guido

On 6/7/06, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at verizon.net> wrote:
> When the result of an expression is None, the interactive interpreter
> correctly suppresses the display of the result.  However, it also
>  suppresses the underscore assignment.  I'm not sure if that is correct
>  or desirable because a subsequent statement has no way of knowing
>  whether the underscore assignment is current or whether it represents an
>  earlier non-None result.
>
>  Here's an example from a co-worker's regular expression experiments:
>
> >>> import re, string
> >>> re.search('lmnop', string.letters)
> <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb6f2c480>
> >>> re.search('pycon', string.letters)
> >>> if _ is not None:
>  ...         print _.group()
> lmnop
>
>
>
>  Raymond
>
>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)